Fluffy Sweet Hawaiian Rolls Recipe (Better Than Store-Bought!)

Ever wonder how to make those sweet squishy Hawaiian rolls at home? Even better than store-bought ones? Hi Bold Bakers, I'm Gemma Stafford, professional chef and baker and I'm going to show you how you can get that soft and fluffy texture at home. We'll mix a rich dough with pineapple juice and honey for sweetness, shape and proof each roll until pillowy and then bake them golden brown for that signature look and flavor. So let's start making our dough. This is quite a traditional dough. We're going to go in with the dry ingredients into our stand mixer. I like to make dinner rolls with all-purpose flour and not strong flour and I'll tell you why. Dinner rolls have a soft crumb, they don't have a lot of bite and they don't have a lot of chew. You want them to just almost melt in your mouth and using all-purpose flour will give you that. If you go stronger there'll be more gluten and it'll be chewier and that's not what we want. We want a nice soft buttery roll. So my recommendation for any dinner rolls is all-purpose flour. Next up when it comes to bread making, any kind of dough at all, salt. Salt is super important in dough making. So now let's talk yeast. I've been a pastry chef for over 20 years and at the beginning I used to use active dried yeast but now I use instant yeast because it just goes like this straight into the flour like any other ingredient like sugar, salt, whatever it is. With active dried yeast you have to sponge it and activate it in hot water. On biggerbolterbaking.com along with the recipe I'll tell you how you can do that. I'm just going to mix those dry ingredients together. When adding in your salt and yeast I always like to put that separate sides of the bowl and then mix it in later just not directly on top of each other because the salt can deactivate the yeast. So for our wet ingredients they're a little bit different than traditional dinner roll ingredients like this for instance pineapple juice. Now these rolls are traditionally sweeter, they're light, and there's something kind of tropical about them being Hawaiian rolls and the base of it is some pineapple juice. Into this I'm going to add in a little bit of white vinegar. You can also use maybe apple cider vinegar, give that a little bit of a mix. Next we're going to add in some runny honey. Now yeast to doughs love a little bit of sugar because yeast feeds off it but Hawaiian rolls are traditionally on the sweeter side. It's just the way they are. I think that's why we love them so much. So then when you use your rolls to make pulled pork sandwiches maybe like ham sandwiches or turkey with leftover Thanksgiving dinner the sweetness of the roll really complements the savory and the salty of the filling. We're going to add in our milk in here. Use whole milk for more fat. More fat means more flavor. Whiskey whiskey and lastly our egg. This is definitely a nice rich sweet flavorful dough. Lovely whiskey whiskey whiskey wet ingredients. Back on with our machine. Now with your machine on add in your wet ingredients. If you want to knead your dough on medium speed for around six to eight minutes and really let that gluten develop. Now come here to me I want you to see this. So there's a little bit of dry in here. Be patient let that keep on mixing. As you can see it's slowly incorporating into the dough without lashing in more liquid. Often when people make bread doughs they kind of freak out like I did in the past when I was a young baker and I would add in too much liquid then but look at now all the dry ingredients are mixed in. Our dough is cleaning the bowl. It's formed one big dough and this is exactly the texture you want. You're going to want to let your dough knead for around eight to ten minutes or so let that gluten develop. So if Hawaiian rolls are new to you've never heard of them before and I first had them when I came to the US. They're available in grocery stores everywhere here and they're often used for like pulled pork sandwiches for sliders they're like these lovely little rolls and probably most importantly for dinner rolls during the holidays during Thanksgiving and and Christmas. They're really delicious but to have them homemade fresh is just next level so you're really really going to love this recipe. And our dough is done. Look at that nice clean bowl. I can tell with the kneading that the dough has really strengthened. So here's a nice big bowl that I'm going to proof my dough in. It has been lightly oils. Always oil the bowl that a dough is going to proof in. I'll tell you why. Used to doughs are living things and they need a few things to help them go and to thrive. They need sugar which is their food which we put in in the recipe. They need warmth. That's why we're going to cover it up with some cling wrap and a towel to keep it nice and warm. They need time. Doughs need love. When you take care of them from the beginning to the very end you really reap the rewards of a beautiful loaf of bread. So that being said let's set this guy over to the side. Let it proof at room temperature for around an hour and a half to two hours until it is doubled in size. So after around the two hour mark your dough will look like this. Beautiful and happy and bubbly. See that bubble? Like I said a living thing. A happy beautiful dough. People always ask me what's my favorite thing to bake. Doughs. I love working with doughs. I love like caring for them and building them, feeding them, developing them. Different types of doughs. Absolutely gorgeous and especially enriched doughs like this one. So to divide our dough I like to use a weighing scale because my baker brain says I have to get everything exactly right. When you're doing it at home if you're doing it out of scale we're looking for 20 rolls and they're going to be around 60 or just a little less than 70 grams each. So we want them around 66 grams just like that. This is my super power. It's my party trick. I always know exactly what weight in my hand a ball of dough is. And just so you know that Hawaiian rolls traditionally are small because they normally are for sliders like I said or for dinner rolls but if you want to make them bigger for like hamburgers and things like that you want to weigh them a little under four ounces and you'll get 12. So for the rolling of the dough this is really important. I'll tell you why. If you don't roll a bread roll really smooth it's going to bake really knobbly and weird and not like uniform like the way that I know you want them. So I'm going to show you how to do that. Number one, see this we're not using any flour. When making bread rolls when you're working on the countertop use something like not wood use marble or some sort of stone something that you can get some traction on. Do not put flour on your surface because you will lose your traction if you put flour on your surface. Get your bread rolls do one at a time but I'm a professional so I can do two. Push them into the counter and into your pan round and round and round and you get lovely smooth balls of dough. You do want to roll your bread rolls kind of quick and if you're a little bit slower at it then cover them over with a towel so they don't form a skin because you don't want to skin on your bread rolls. And we are going to line them up four by five and there's the last one. Now come here to me I want you to see this the rolls are to be touching each other just like so because Hawaiian rolls traditionally are batched baked and what that means is once they rise and proof they bake into each other and that's the style of them it makes them really easy to like what's it called tear and share. So you want them sitting right up next to each other giving each other a little smoosh a little smooch on the cheek. So cover it in cling wrap. When you're proofing and rising dough like this you don't want the air to get out because like I mentioned earlier can form a skin once it forms that skin it can't proof any longer which will inhibit its growing. So we're going to leave it like this we're going to make a nice and snug again and we are going to leave these proof pop them in a little warm spot in your kitchen nice and toasty for around an hour and a half or so they're going to rise up they'll probably double in size and you'll see them start to proof into each other. I'm going to come back when we're at that stage. So it has been around 45 minutes or so and if you look at my rolls they look gorgeous they've all proofed up and they're all kind of sitting smushy all together. This is the perfect time to egg wash them you don't want them to get too big or they'll over proof and if a roll over proofs it will collapse and you'll definitely see that. So you want them to just be the perfect size to like bake up lovely. So I'm going to egg wash these gently as it is a soft roll full of air so just go easy with your brush gently egg wash all over. When it comes to bread rolls I cannot strongly recommend egg washing enough it really is a must because it gives you a beautiful shiny golden brown roll and if you don't do it they end up being a little bit matte also a little bit dry like they look dry and I feel like the crust can be different. I feel like egg wash definitely gives you a softer crust. There you go there's nothing more to do now except to get these guys into a nice hot oven. Bake your Hawaiian rolls at 375 degrees Fahrenheit or 190 degrees Celsius for roughly 25 to 30 minutes until they're a lovely golden brown on top. My whole house smells warm and buttery and delicious so that means my rolls are done so let's go check them out. These rolls look absolutely gorgeous they are beautiful shiny golden brown and they smell amazing they are exactly what I was hoping for and they grew nice and big and you can tell they're light and fluffy. This is such a treat to have a whole panel of fresh Hawaiian rolls made from scratch. With all of my bread I always like to let it cool down in the tin before taking it out. Hawaiian rolls are known as a tear and share and just look at this watch as you pull them apart and in layers they just softly peel away from each other. You can tell how billowy and fluffy these rolls are just by looking at them. My suggestion with these rolls is enjoy them the day that they're baked because they will be at their very best. During the holidays we think about a lot of pies but don't forget about the roll that you're going to put on your holiday table this year. Make sure it's truly amazing just like these. Thank you so much for watching and if you're in the mood for more holiday content then get comfy. I have hundreds of videos for you to check out. I'll see you back here again really soon.