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Excellent Rolls

Soft rolls made with milk, butter, yeast, sugar, salt, and egg whites, folded with butter and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Excellent Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Scald the milk and let it cool.

  2. Add sugar, yeast, and enough flour to make a stiff batter.

  3. Let the batter rise overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. In the morning, add butter, salt, and beaten egg whites.

  2. Mix and knead well, then let it rise again.

  3. Knead again and roll out to ¾ inch thickness.

  4. Cut with a biscuit cutter, spread butter on one half, and fold the other half over.

  5. Let rise until very light, then bake.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Provides liquid that hydrates the flour and gives the dough a soft, tender crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas during the overnight rise, leavening the dough so it becomes light.
Egg whites
Add protein that adds structure and helps the rolls hold their shape and rise.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the dough, tenderizes the crumb, and adds richness to the layers.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast so it ferments actively and browns the rolls slightly during baking.

The step that matters

Let the batter rise overnight. The yeast needs time to ferment and build gas and flavour; a short rise leaves the dough dense and under-developed, so the rolls will not turn out light.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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