Dinner Roll

A dinner roll, if pulled from its foodservice-industry plastic bag and served at room temperature, can be the most boring bread of all. That’s OK for some meals, barbecue in particular, where one wants a totally bland breadstuff to sop up sauce and gravy but not interfere with its flavor. On the other hand, freshly-made dinner rolls, brought to the table still warm, swaddled in a napkin, are a joyful fanfare for the meal to come. Even the best from-scratch dinner rolls are not scene-stealers. They are pillow-soft, fluffy-crumbed, and likely glazed with butter. Varieties of dinner roll include butterflakes with fanned-out tops, Parker House rolls (soft and sweet and folded in two), and cloverleafs (3 balls of dough baked together to fuse in a muffin cup.