The Perfect Dinner Roll

 

I finally found the recipe for the holy grail of dinner rolls.  While you may not think baking a good dinner roll is a big deal, I assure you that it actually is.  Americans eat a lot of bread.  When you go into a nice restaurant they usually serve you some kind of bread with your meal unless you ordered a sandwich or something that could be considered lunch food and is already served on bread.  Eating bread has some religious implications, but I’m not going to discuss any of those here.  You can go read about them somewhere else.  At any rate, let’s just say that Americans eat a lot of bread because we like it.

I’ve always loved baking and did a lot of baking when I worked in restaurants and clubs throughout my many years in foodservice.  When I bought my first restaurant we purchased sliced Italian bread loaves and pizza dough from a local family-owned Italian bakery.  This bakery’s sliced white bread and dinner rolls had been a staple in Omaha’s Italian restaurants for over 50 years.  The bakery also made pizza, so I was able to buy dough from them to make our pizza.  My restaurant was far away enough that they didn’t consider us their competition in the pizza market, plus we sold a ton of pizza so they they made a lot of money selling dough to us. There were two Italian bakeries in Omaha at the time and this one was the smaller one.  I thought the bread tasted like sawdust, but my customers loved it so we kept using it.

One day the bread guy didn’t show up.  We had enough bread from the previous day so I wasn’t particularly worried about it.  Then he didn’t show up the next day, either.  When I called the bakery to ask when they would be delivering to us they transferred me to the owner.  He told me that they had decided to stop delivering  to our part of Omaha.  This was the first I had heard of their plan, so I was pissed off and I let him know about it.  He just hung up on me so that was the end of my business relationship with them.  Forever.

Now, baking Italian bread is not rocket science, but it requires a little planning to know how much to make and when to start making it in order to give the dough enough time to rise properly and develop the correct texture and flavor.  I was very busy with other aspects of reviving a previously failing restaurant, so making bread and pizza dough wasn’t too high on my favorite things to do every day, but I did it anyway.  The upside was that my customers liked our bread more than the Italian bakery’s product.  They often stopped by for a couple of loaves to take home in the late afternoon when it was fresh from the oven.  Our pizza dough was way better than theirs, too, and we saw our pizza sales quickly rise to over 100 pizzas per night and over 200 on our Tuesday Pizza nights.  We competed with all the Italian places in town, but we sold a shit ton more pizzas than anyone else.

I had always tried baking dinner rolls at home for family gatherings, but I could never produce a really good one.  I got tired of wasting a lot of time trying to bake rolls for every gathering and usually I just bought them at the grocery store.  Sadly, the grocery store rolls were better than mine anyway.

When I opened my second restaurant, much smaller than the first one, I knew I wanted to make my own baked goods there.  The Italian bakery that crewed me over in the first restaurant was just one block away and my new place would also offer pizza as a small plate appetizer or as a light entree so they didn’t want my business.  They loudly voiced their displeasure at the fact that I was going to sell pizza right in “their” neighborhood.  Anyway, I developed a pretty good recipe for dinner rolls and began making them for our bread baskets.  The Italian bakery wasn’t too happy about that either, but I got over it.  After a couple of months of making them I decided to just make a nice focaccia bread in large sheets and serve that instead of dinner rolls.  I realized that  after 30 years I still hadn’t found the perfect dinner roll.  I eventually retired from foodservice without ever finding it.

So, a couple of months ago I was looking for something on the King Arthur Baking web site and came across a recipe for Amish dinner rolls.  The picture in the recipe looked exactly like what I was looking for so I made half a batch to try them out.  Bingo.  Big, beautiful, buttery brown tender crust on the outside, pillow soft and buttery sweet on the inside.  The ones in the picture above are almost two days old, but you get the idea.  I remember eating these at those big cafeteria-style restaurants when I was a kid.  Delicious and pretty easy to make.  You don’t have to start making the dough the day before and they keep really well if you keep them tightly covered.

I’m not going to include the recipe here because I don’t want to do any more cutting, pasting, and formatting than necessary, but you can get it for yourself at this link:

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/amish-dinner-rolls-recipe

Incidentally, there are lots of really good recipes on the King Arthur web site.  In case you didn’t know, King Arthur is a company that produces baking ingredients and supplies.  Lots of good stuff there.

Good luck.  I’m sure your family and guests will love these.