High Altitude Parker House Dinner Rolls with Maple Butter
These Parker House dinner rolls are impossibly soft, fluffy, and buttery, melt-in-your-mouth delicious, sweetened with pure maple syrup and slathered with maple butter. A perfect roll to serve with Thanksgiving dinner.
All recipes on Curly Girl Kitchen are developed for high altitude at 5,280 feet. See FAQs for adjusting to higher or lower elevations.
Equipment
- Stand Mixer with Dough Hook
Ingredients
Dough
- 4 tbsp unsalted butter
- ¾ cup whole milk
- 3 ¼ cups bread flour, spooned and leveled (plus 1/4 cup for rolling out the dough)
- 1 packet (2 1/4 tsp) instant or rapid rise yeast
- 1 tsp coarse Kosher salt (if using table salt, use half the amount)
- ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
- 3 tbsp pure maple syrup or honey (or 1/4 cup granulated sugar)
- 2 large eggs, room temperature
- 1 large egg, (for optional egg wash)
Maple Butter
- ½ cup unsalted butter, very soft
- 4 tbsp pure maple syrup or honey
- ¼ tsp coarse Kosher salt (if using table salt, use half the amount)
Instructions
Dough
- In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium low heat. Stir in the milk, and warm just until the mixture reaches between 110-115 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove from the heat.If it gets too hot, let it sit for a few minutes until it cools down to the correct temperature. It's important that you check the temperature – if it's too cold, it won't activate the yeast, and if it's too hot, it will kill the yeast.
- In the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the dough hook, combine the flour, yeast, salt, and nutmeg. Add the warm butter/milk, maple syrup and 2 eggs.
- Knead the dough on medium/low speed for 5 minutes. The dough will be very soft and sticky, and will not form a dough ball.
- Grease a bowl with non-stick baking spray or oil. Use a spatula to scrape the dough out of the mixing bowl, into the greased bowl. Cover the bowl of dough tightly with plastic wrap. Set the dough in a warm place to rise until doubled in size, about 45-90 minutes.If your oven has a bread-proofing setting, you can use that to proof your dough. If not, let your oven preheat to the lowest setting, turn the oven off, and then set your dough inside to rise.
- Set the bowl of dough, still covered, in the refrigerator, and chill for 2 hours, or preferably overnight.This rest period allows the gluten to rest and the dough to develop flavor. Also, since this is a very soft dough, it's extremely difficult to work with when it's not chilled. The cold dough is very easy to roll out, fill, roll up and cut.
Maple Butter
- While the dough is rising/chilling, get your butter ready.
- In a bowl, use a hand mixer (or a strong arm) to combine the softened butter with the maple syrup and salt until smooth and creamy.
- You'll be using about half of the butter to spread inside the rolls before baking, and saving the other half to serve with the rolls.
Assembly
- When you're ready to shape your rolls, grease a 9x13 baking dish with butter or non-stick baking spray.
- Use the remaining 1/4 cup of flour to flour your work surface, and turn the cold dough out onto the flour.
- On your floured surface, roll out the dough into a rectangle approximately 10x18 inches.Spread the dough with 1/3 of the maple butter.Use a pastry cutter to cut the dough into 12 rectangles, then roll up each rectangle into a spiral (with the butter inside), or fold into thirds as shown in the video.
- Arrange the rolls in your baking dish, seam side down.
- Set the pan in a warm place for about 30-45 minutes, until the rolls have started to puff.
Bake
- Preheat the oven to 425 F, and position a rack in the center of the oven.
- Lightly beat the last egg, and gently brush the beaten egg over the tops of the rolls. (When making the video, I forgot the egg wash, but I found that I preferred the color and texture of the baked rolls without egg wash. When I make these now, I always leave off the egg wash.)
- Place the pan in the oven, and immediately reduce the temperature from 425 to 375F. Bake the rolls for about 25-30 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and the rolls are baked through (an instant read digital meat thermometer inserted in the center should read 195 F.
- While the rolls are hot, you can brush the tops with a little more of the maple butter, and sprinkle them with flaky salt, if you like.
- Serve the rolls warm with the leftover maple butter.
Video
Notes
Store the leftover rolls in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.
To reheat the rolls, you can reheat them in the oven until the outside is slightly crisp and the inside is soft and warmed through. Use a convection oven to lightly toast them for 4-5 minutes, or at about 300 degrees F in a conventional oven for 5-10 minutes. Or you can warm them in the microwave for about 30 seconds on 50% power.
Every time I make these rolls, I roll the dough out to slightly different dimensions, and then experiment with various ways to fold the dough. My goal is for the folded rolls to fit nicely into the pan, and look beautiful when they bake. When I created the video (after multiple previous test bakes), my favorite method was the one I used in the video. I rolled the dough out to approximately 10x18 inches, cut it into 12 rectangles, and folded each rectangle into thirds. I arranged the rolls in the pan in an alternating pattern (long ends touching the short sides, for lack of a better way to explain it), but that you can see in the video. I love how these look after baking, and the rolls are so soft, fluffy, and perfectly shaped for splitting open, slathering with butter, or making into a sandwich with leftover Thanksgiving turkey.
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