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Bread

15 Tea Rolls

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

15 Tea Rolls

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In the morning, mix warm milk, bread sponge, butter, sugar, and enough flour to achieve a griddle cake thickness.

  2. Let the mixture rise until noon.

  3. Knead the dough as you would for bread.

Shape and bake

  1. At 4 o'clock, shape the dough into rolls and dip the tops in melted butter.

  2. Allow the rolls to rise again before baking 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, 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

Bread sponge
Provides the yeast-leavened starter that makes the dough rise and gives it a light, airy crumb.
Flour
Forms the gluten structure of the dough, and its amount sets the thickness of the batter.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and the melted topping helps the rolls brown and taste rich.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness and some browning to the crust.
Warm milk
Adds moisture and softness to the dough and helps the yeast become active.

The step that matters

Second rise before baking. Letting the shaped rolls rise again lets gas build up in the dough so the rolls bake up light. Baking too early can leave them 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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