Soft dinner rolls
16 dinner rolls
20 minutes
25 minutes
2 hours and 45 minutes
Ingredients:
dinner roll dough- 360 grams all purpose flour (3 cups)
- 43 grams dried potato flakes/instant mashed potatoes (1/2 cup - or dried potato flour: same amount)
- 28 grams special dry milk or dry milk powder (4 tablespoons)
- 25 grams sugar (3 tablespoons)
- 8 grams salt (1 1/4 teaspoons)
- 8 grams instant yeast (2 teaspoons)
- 43 grams room temperature butter (3 tablespoons)
- 1 large egg
- 227 grams warm water (1 cup)
- 57 grams melted butter (4 tablespoons)
Related blog post: The Yesterday-was-Thanksgiving sandwich
Directions:
Weigh all your ingredients and add them to the bowl of your stand mixer or if kneading by hand, add to a large bowl.
If using a stand mixer, knead for 8 minutes on medium speed. If you are kneading by hand, you will need about 15 minutes of kneading after all the ingredients are incorporated together.
Place your dough in a lightly oiled bowl and cover. Let dough rise in a warm place for 1 to 1.5 hours. The dough should be almost doubled in size.
Remove dough from bowl to a lightly oiled counter. If you have a scale, you should weigh your whole dough ball and divide that total (in grams) by either 16 or 20. Use 16 if you want larger rolls and 20 if you want standard size dinner rolls. Whatever number you get after dividing will tell you what weight each of your roll portions will be in grams. If you do not have a scale, you will just need to divide your dough into either 16 or 20 pieces depending on if you want small or larger rolls.
Weigh and measure each portion and roll each dough portion into balls. At this point you will either have 16 or 20 portions.
Coat a 9x13 inch baking pan very lightly with oil or non-stick cooking spray. If you opted for 16 dough balls, you would arrange them in the pan in four rows of four balls each. If you chose 20, you should have five rows of four balls each. The dough balls should be spaced as evenly as you can space them. There will probably be about an inch or so between each one.
Note: if you do not have a 9x13 inch baking pan, you can use multiple smaller pans or even a sheet pan if that's what you have. Just keep all of your dough balls consistently distanced from each other about an inch between each one.
Cover your baking dish with lightly greased plastic wrap or a sheet pan flipped over on top of the pan you're using.
Let the baking dish filled with dough balls rise for another hour or hour and a half until they are nearly doubled in size.
Near the end of your final proofing time, pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees F (175 C).
Bake your rolls in the baking pan for 20 to 25 minutes rotating the pan halfway through the baking time. I typically bake for 12 minutes and then rotate and come back in another 10 minutes to see what my level of brownness looks like. At that point your buns should be done all the way through, you're just trying to get them to the color you prefer.
Remove rolls from oven and brush with 3 to 4 tablespoons of melted butter to leave your buns with a softer top and a glossy sheen (optional).