Skip to main content
Bread

Milk Rolls

Milk rolls are small rolls made from self-raising flour, butter, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Milk Rolls

twelve rolls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a bowl, rub 2 oz of butter into 1 lb of self-raising flour using your hands.

  2. Add enough milk to form a firm dough.

  3. Sprinkle flour on a board and turn the dough out onto it.

Shape the rolls

  1. Flour a knife and cut the dough into twelve pieces. Keep your hands floured to prevent sticking.

  2. Shape each piece into a small roll.

  3. Flour a baking tin and place the rolls on it.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Self-raising flour
Provides the structure of the rolls and, with its raising agent, lets them rise in the oven.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it coats the flour particles and gives the rolls a tender, crumbly texture.
Milk
Hydrates the flour so the mixture binds into a dough and adds moisture to the crumb.

The step that matters

Adding the milk. Too much milk makes the dough sticky and hard to shape, while too little leaves it dry and crumbly. Add it gradually until the dough just holds together, since flour absorbs liquid differently from batch to batch.

“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.

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes