These easy soft yeast rolls can be made ahead and refrigerated until you are ready to bake and serve. This recipe result in tender, fluffy, chewy and buttery rolls easy enough for any day of the week and special enough for holiday gatherings!
Every time a big holiday meal is about to roll around I have a struggle with the huge life decision of yeast rolls or biscuits? These are the big questions in life. How do we make these kinds of decisions?!
But I realized the other day that I had disproportionate number of biscuit recipes to roll recipes on the site. And since we are still in the middle of the working with yeast series, I thought this would be the perfect time to teach you how to make my favorite soft yeast rolls!
If you remember from the first recipe in the series, we made an easy rustic bread. This rustic bread was a lean bread, requiring only 4 ingredients and no fat. Lean breads are crusty and chewy.
Today we are going to make a rich bread. Rich breads include more liquid and fat, usually from eggs, butter, and/or oil. Rich breads are more tender, but this also means that the dough is a little trickier to handle.
The dough tends to be softer and stickier and this tends to pull people into adding more flour to the dough to make it easier to handle. Try to avoid this! You want a high fat to flour ratio to keep the bread tender and soft.
If you have a stand mixer, this dough can easily be mixed with the dough hook. But I actually prefer to knead bread dough by hand. It is therapeutic for me and I like to get a feel for the dough to know when it is ready.
It is up to you how you want to knead the bread, but really try to avoid adding more flour than necessary.
Ingredients
1 c water, warm
1 pkg active dry yeast
1/4 c sugar
1 tsp salt
3 Tbsp butter, softened
1 large egg, beaten
3 1/2 – 4 c all-purpose flour
Directions
1. Pre-heat oven 350 degrees. Put water and yeast in large mixing bowl and add next 4 ingredients. Beat with dough hook until well blended.
2. Add 3 1/2 to 4 cups flour and mix until soft dough forms (should not be sticky).
3. Put out onto floured board and knead a few times until smooth.
4. Place in greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rise in warm place for approximately 45 minutes.
5. Punch down and turn out onto floured board.
6. Shape into 12 rolls and place in greased 13×9 inch baking pan. Let rise again about 30 minutes.
7. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.
8. Brush tops of rolls with butter (or equivalent).
Last Step: Don’t forget to share!