The Best Homemade Dinner Rolls You’ll Ever Eat - HeyHo Kids

- [Claire King] Dinner rolls are actually a super-sexy, super-satisfying and honestly, one of the better parts of a big, banquet meal.

It's a very easy introduction to dough and introduction to bread, but dinner roll is basically like your fourth utensil, right? You have your fork, your knife, your spoon, and then you have your dinner roll, and that's what's gonna help sop up all the really best parts of your dinner, so respect it.

(gentle pop music) There's a bunch of different types of flour out there.

You've got the whole wheat that has the bran in there.

You've got almond flour and all these different gluten-free options nowadays.

We're gonna use all-purpose.

When you're starting out making bread, all-purpose is a great one to start with.

Because it is so refined, it's very predictable.

It's gonna give you the result that you're after.

Yeast.

There's three standard ones you can get in the US and around the world.

They're called different things in different places.

You have active dry, you have instant yeast, and you also have fresh.

Here we have all the different tests for yeast to see what would the result be in the bread.

Do we really taste or see a difference in the rising in terms of speed, how big the doughs got, all of that? We bloomed the fresh and the active dry.

We did not bloom the rapid 'cause it is not recommended to do so.

We all used the exact same amount of ingredients.

We used the flour from the same bag, but all of ours were different levels of soft.

The instant was super hard.

The active dry was the mama bear of them.

It was the in between and the fresh was super soft.

Because we wanna have a little more control over our dough, we wanted to use active dry.

To wake it up, we're gonna put it in a liquid and the sugar and butter are gonna act as food for the yeast.

To make our blooming liquid, we're gonna start with some warm milk.

We're gonna add a little bit of warm water and melted butter.

To that, we're gonna add sugar.

Sugar is gonna be the main thing that's gonna give our yeast some food to really quickly start to work.

In goes our yeast.

We're gonna stir it to make sure the granules could evenly dissolve and be mixed in evenly with all those ingredients.

We're gonna leave that for about five minutes and it should look something like this.

If you don't see anything close to this, you should throw everything away and start with some new yeast.

Your yeast might be old or dead.

Once we've bloomed our yeast, we're gonna set it off to the side.

In goes the flour and the salt and we're just gonna super quickly incorporate the salt into the flour again, so it doesn't hit a huge block of salt when the yeast goes in.

We're gonna add an egg to this dough that's gonna further enrich our dough.

It's also gonna give us a little bit of color, a bit of extra flavor, and a bit of oomph.

Add it to our bloomed yeast mixture and then just quickly as your can pour it into the flour.

I'm gonna use the same knife just to hydrate as much of the flour as quickly as I can.

Once I'm getting it to a roughly shaggy dough, I can pour it out of my bowl without making too huge of a mess onto a clean floured surface and really start to make this into a dough.

This dough is definitely on the wetter side, so you wanna keep a little bit of bench flour and that just means a little extra flour (laughs) around to add to your dough as you go to make it a little bit easier to work with and so that it's not too wet.

The cool thing with bread is that wetter is better, unlike pastry, which you want to be on the drier side, so it's pretty fun to work with.

It's pretty easy to work with as well, but if it's really sticking to your hands or to the surface, all you need to do is add a little bit more flour and it'll be much easier to work with.

Depending on how old your flour is, how big your egg is, I mean, there's so much that's going in here, you're probably gonna need more flour than you think.

Before you go too far, get all these extra bits off your hands from when you first start rolling, 'cause no matter what, you're gonna have a little bit of those scraggly bits on your hands, so get those off and start incorporating those into your dough early so that you don't have big scraggly bits later on, again, because you're gonna be kneading for a good 10 minutes or so, those will pretty easily be incorporated into the dough, but if you wait too long, then you'll just have a big chunk.

Kneading, this is one thing that I think people tend to under do almost always.

If you're doing this by hand, I promise you, it's almost impossible to over knead.

If you are using a stand mixer, it is possible and what will start to happen, it will kind of fall apart.

It'll just turn almost liquidy, and that means that you've just overworked the gluten and you over kneaded it, but by hand, trust me, you're probably under kneading it.

What I like to do is I like to roll the dough on top of itself and then push it out.

Rotate, fold it over itself, push again.

Rotate, pull over itself and push.

You can just continue to do this.

I like to work in a bit of a ball shape, always making a shape of a roll, and once I'm getting the dough to a place that I like, I'm actually gonna switch to this heart method.

It just makes it a little bit more efficient.

You just roll it back and then by the time you come down towards you, it's in the shape of a cylinder almost, and then you roll it the other way.

You're making sure that you're really evenly kneading out the dough and not totally exhausting one of your arms.

And to tell that you've kneaded enough, a really easy thing to do is pull off a piece of the dough and make a little bit of a window pane with it and stretch it out.

If it doesn't tear, you can actually see those strands of gluten that have developed and that should give you a pretty good indicator that your dough is ready to rise.

Or you can push into the dough and if it bounces back at you, you've developed enough gluten and the dough is ready to sit.

Once we're ready, we're going to oil a bowl, put our dough inside of it, make sure that it's covered in oil as well so it doesn't stick and then cover with cling film to rise in a warm area.

To get all of the dough and flour and everything off the bench, these bench scrapers are amazing and such an easy cook's tool.

You should definitely get one.

As the cling film fogs up, that's actually all this gas being released that we talked about, that's the yeast working, so all of that rising in that dough is creating that little bit of condensation within the bowl.

This is actually a rise.

The proof is gonna happen after it's doubled in size.

If you want a slow rise, you can put the dough in your fridge, whereas if leaving it out in a warm place, it'll happen a lot quicker.

With active dry yeast, it should double in size in about an hour.

Take off the cling and pop! We punch it pretty just 'cause it's fun, but also because we're gonna turn out the dough and even out all those bubbles in the dough.

I'm gonna knead it again for a few minutes and even out the different texture within the dough and then we're gonna cut it into pieces.

If you want super exact dough balls, you should definitely invest in a scale and weigh them out.

Another trick if you want really even sized bread rolls is to always work in halves.

The easiest thing for me is I just continue to cut things in half, so I have this big piece.

I'm gonna cut this piece in half and just continue to cut these pieces in half, and for me, it's easier to make them into round balls, again, just to make sure that I'm being super precise with my cuts to get even sized bread rolls.

Now that we have our dough divided into its pieces, it's time to shape them into their cute little rolls.

Before you even start shaping it, I'm gonna start to knead the little pieces.

You can do a few different things.

You can knead it the same way we were talking about before and press it into a little disc first and then take the outer pieces and push them into the center, but what you're really trying to do when it's all said and done, regardless of whatever technique that you use, is you're trying to make the bottom of the piece that you're rolling taut.

What we really want is to gather all the outside pieces in the middle and then make the top of it taut.

What I'm doing here is I'm using my hands to pinch from the middle of the roll to the very bottom and when I do that, I'm also rotating my hands, so every time I'm doing that, I'm squeezing the bottom and making sure that I'm making the top taut and making all the ugly pieces be on the bottom.

Take your time with shaping.

You've gotten it this far, make sure that they're really beautiful when it's all said and done.

But this is also something that you definitely outsource.

I always get made fun of as Tasty 'cause I'm always trying to give people jobs to do, but if you have a whole bunch of people coming over, this is definitely an easy way to get everyone involved and playing with dough is very satisfying.

There's just something about it that's very soothing and very soulful in some ways, so there's no one who's gonna say no.

I mean, it's so fun to do.

Once we're happy with all of our shaped dough, I'm gonna place them on a parchment lined baking sheet and you want them to be a little bit far, but not too far because I really want these to touch a little bit.

That's the dinner roll look.

You've gotta have it.

I know you're eager.

You've gotten these all in their perfect shapes, but they need to rise just a little bit more.

The first one was the rise and now our rolls are going to proof.

We're going to cover it up with cling and then let it sit for 30 minutes, an hour.

We want them to rise again.

We've been a little bit kneady with the dough.

You've guys have had too much time together, so now the dough needs a little bit of space before it'll really perform.

And look how pillowy those are.

Seriously, look how much they've risen.

They're now touching but not too much.

Last thing.

So if you watched our pie episode, we tested a whole bunch of different washes to put on dough before it goes in the oven and honestly, egg is just super easy and classic and gives you a really great shiny brown.

For that dinner roll shine, you need an egg wash.

Take your time.

These are delicate little babies at this point, so if you come in real hot with that brush and just really poke them, they will deflate a little bit.

Now this is totally optional, but we are going to top ours with a little bit of sea salt mostly because I just could never get enough salt.

Season high.

The higher you go, it'll be a more even distribution.

If you season too close to the roll, it'll all get in one clump.

I'm sure you've experienced that before.

We tested a few different temperatures.

Bread ideally does need a pretty high heat, but these are little baby rolls, so we did have to throw back the heat a little bit.

We ended up with 375.

Wow! And that gives us the perfect amount of brown while cooking the rolls through.

Freshly baked bread is just one of those things that, I mean, the crumb on this, the texture here.

I mean, you could sleep on this.

It's like a pillow.

I mean, look at that.

It's got a great sweet savory flavor on the inside.

You've got the sesame seeds, you can do garlic butter, you can do, I mean, anything.

Or you can do nothing and just sop it up with some gravy or butter or jam.

It cannot be overstated how much this fourth utensil will contribute to your next dinner party.

I'm not eating anything else this holiday season aside from bread rolls.

(laughs) Make these bread rolls, tag us in your photos because I need to know that the world believes in bread rolls as much as we believe in bread rolls.