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Tea Rolls

A yeast dough roll made with milk, sugar, butter, salt, eggs, and flour, baked after rising.

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 ↓

Tea Rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Add sugar, butter, salt, beaten eggs, and yeast to the milk.

  3. Stir in enough flour to form a stiff batter, then cover.

  4. Let rise overnight.

  5. Knead the dough well.

  6. Let it rise again until light.

Shape the rolls

  1. Roll the dough to ¾ inch thick.

  2. Cut with a biscuit cutter.

  3. Butter one half.

  4. Roll the other half over it.

  5. Let the rolls rise until very light.

Bake

  1. 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 + 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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 stiff batter and gluten network that gives the rolls structure.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the crumb as the rolls bake.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and flavour, and separates the layers.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise and become light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the yeast, helping it rise and brown the crust.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the dough.

The step that matters

Let the rolls rise until very light. The yeast's gas needs time to expand the shaped dough. Underproofed rolls bake up dense, while overproofed rolls can collapse or turn coarse.

“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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