The dinner roll is a quintessential component at a Midwestern Thanksgiving. When I close my eyes and dream of Thanksgiving in my youth, one of the first things that pops into my mind is a basket being passed around with dinner rolls. My grandmother, Dorothy, was known for serving store-bought brown-and-serve dinner rolls straight from the oven. It was the final component to be removed from her tiny wall oven just as the gravy was being nursed and the turkey carved. Seated at the kids table in the corner of the kitchen, my fingers would burn as I tore off a hot roll, searching frantically for the butter dish. Crusty on the outside, fluffy and warm on the inside, the rolls offered ideal conditions for a schmear of salted butter.
The entire idea of this recipe is constructed around making the bread nearly all the way to completion but saving the “browning” until right before serving. Brown ’n serve, take ’n bake, bake ’n serve—whatever you want to call it, this category of bread is not original nor something my grandmother invented. This style of parbaked bread was allegedly invented by accident around 1949 in Avon Park, Florida, when a local baker started baking a batch of rolls but was interrupted by a fire alarm. The unfinished rolls turned out to be shelf-stable for a few days, and easy to finish and brown in an oven. General Mills bought the process from the bakery and took it mainstream.
Years later as a Minnesota kid in the ’90s, I recall the sight of pale dinner rolls at nearly every grocery store and always on my grandma’s counter begging to be browned. Now, in an age of copious Thanksgiving bread options, brown-and-serve rolls are a rarer sight, but the concept is begging for a popular comeback. Anyone who enjoys cooking and baking knows homemade bread requires advance planning and multiple hours of commitment. But with this recipe, you can make, parbake, and freeze the rolls at your convenience and eat them fresh and warm whenever dinner is ready.
Apart from convenience, baking your dinner rolls from scratch lets you fine-tune the ingredients, avoiding the preservatives that keep grocery store brands shelf-stable for weeks at a time. Instead of a classic store-bought 12-pack, this recipe yields 16 rectangular rolls. The size of the dinner roll is not too small where you are fighting for another and not too big to overpower. Staying true to this classic concept, the rolls are baked close together in a 9 x 13” pan lined with parchment paper. The parchment paper helps move rolls with ease from first bake to storage and final bake. The scissor-cut slit on the top of each roll offers both a seamless way to open your roll for that pat of butter but also iconic dinner roll design.
Bread can certainly be an afterthought for dinner; but with a little bit of advance planning, it can be the best part. To this day, my mother always expects her dinner rolls to be hot. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes side-eye her for this staunch opinion, but in developing this recipe I’ve realized that she just might have a point.
