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French Rolls

French rolls are sweet yeast rolls made with scalded milk, sugar, butter, salt, yeast, and flour, brushed with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

French Rolls

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Scald the milk and stir in the sugar and butter while hot.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then add salt and yeast.

  3. Stir in enough flour to make a stiff sponge and let it rise until light.

  4. Punch down the dough and let it rise again, repeating this process two or three times.

Shape and bake

  1. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and roll it out thin.

  2. Cut out rounds with a tumbler.

  3. Brush each round with melted butter.

  4. Fold each round over.

  5. Let the rolls rise on the baking tins.

  6. Bake until golden.

  7. While warm, brush the tops with melted butter.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms the dough structure that traps gas so the rolls can rise and hold their shape.
Yeast
Produces carbon dioxide as it ferments sugars, making the dough rise and become light.
Milk
Adds moisture and proteins that soften the crumb and help browning.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and browning in the crust.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and gives a rich flavour.

The step that matters

Punch down the dough and let it rise again, repeating two or three times. Repeated rising and deflating develops gluten strength and an even crumb. Each rise needs the dough to be properly light before the next punch-down, or the rolls turn out dense.

“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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