HOW TO MAKE YEAST ROLLS | dinner rolls

Hey guys it's Bettie from BakerBettie.com and welcome back to another video. Now today we are learning how to make classic dinner rolls. Now this is a recipe that uses yeast which I hear all the time is really intimidating for people. But I'm going to show you just how easy it really can be. We're going to walk through the process step by step and these rolls turn out so soft and tender and they're just a little bit sweet and they are perfect for a Thanksgiving dinner or a Christmas dinner or really just any occasion that you want some really delicious yeast rolls for. Now if you are interested in learning more about working with yeast, I actually have a whole yeast bread fundamentals course on my website which I will link in the description box for this video. I highly recommend taking the course. It is packed with all kinds of information about working with yeast. But today let's walk step by step through making some classic yeast rolls and let's go ahead and dive in. Now to make our soft dinner rolls we are going to be making what is called an enriched yeast dough. Now this just means that the yeast dough includes some fat as well as eggs and sugar. And these things are going to make our dinner rolls really soft and tender. So I'm starting with 6 tablespoons of unsalted butter and this butter is at room temperature. It is very soft and it's soft enough that I'm going to be able to easily stir it together with my other ingredients. Now the butter in this recipe is going to really help tenderize our yeast rolls. Fat in general works to inhibit gluten formation which is going to help keep our rolls really soft and tender. Now I'm adding to my butter a fourth cup of granulated sugar which is just going to give our rolls a slight sweetness. And I'm also adding one teaspoon of kosher salt. Now that salt is not only going to help flavor our yeast dough but it is also going to help control our yeast activity. If we were to make a yeast dough without any salt at all our yeast would be far too active. So it's a really important ingredient in any yeast dough. So now I'm just going to take a spoon and mix all of this together until it is well combined before we add our next ingredients. We are going to add two eggs that are at room temperature and these eggs are going to add a lot of tenderness and a little bit of chew into our dinner rolls. So I'm going to add those in and mix those with the rest of the ingredients. Our next ingredient is one cup of whole milk and I have slightly warmed this milk just by heating it in the microwave for about 30 seconds. Now you want to be really careful about the temperature of your liquid when you are making yeast dough. Yeast really likes warm temperatures. Somewhere about 110 degrees Fahrenheit is a perfect temperature for yeast to wake up and become active. But if you go a little too hot with your liquid you can easily kill your yeast. So you want to be really careful. Yeast will wake up with cold temperatures. It's just going to be a little slower moving. So I always suggest to err on the side of your liquid being a little too cool if you are unsure. So now I'm just going to go ahead and mix that into our mixture. The last ingredients for our yeast rolls are our flour and our yeast. Now almost every yeast recipe you will find is going to list a range in the flour that you want to put into your bread dough. Flour is very temperamental and depending on where you live and what type of flour you're using you might need more or less in your bread dough. So you want to start with the lowest quantity listed and then you will add more in as needed when you are kneading your bread dough. So I'm going to start with four cups of all-purpose unbleached flour here and then we will add some more into our dough as needed. And our last ingredient is the dried yeast. Now you need one seven gram package or two and a fourth teaspoon of dried yeast. And I have two different kinds of yeast here. The first is active dry yeast and the second is rapid rise which is also known as quick rise or instant yeast. Now you can use either of these for this recipe but I am going to be telling you how you could let these rise overnight in your refrigerator if you do want to prep them the day before. And if you are going to choose that option you really do want to use the active dry yeast instead of the rapid rise yeast so that you don't overproof your rolls. Now if you are going to be making these and baking them same day you can use either active dry or rapid rise. So since I am baking these today I'm going to go ahead and use my quick rise yeast so that my dough gets going a little bit faster. So we're just going to add the whole package of yeast into our dough and if you are using the active dry you can do this the same way just add it right in at this point. You don't need to hydrate the yeast like some recipes call for. And now we're just going to stir all of this together. Now you can see that my dough is pretty wet and sticky at this point so I'm going to add just a little bit more flour. I'm not going to add too much because I can always add more later but just a little bit more so that when I go to knead it it's a little bit easier to handle. Now that all of our ingredients are mixed into our dough we are going to knead it by hand. Now if you do have a stand mixer with a dough hook you can definitely use that but I want to show you that you can definitely make this without any special equipment and kneading by hand is actually such a nice way to get a feel for the dough and I find it quite therapeutic. So I encourage you to do it if you've never tried it. So now what we are going to do is we are going to lightly flour our work surface here and we're going to turn our dough out onto the work surface. And now we're going to start kneading our dough by hand. So what you want to do is lightly flour the top of it as well as flour your hands. And to start kneading your dough you're going to take the end that is the furthest away from you and fold it in half and then use the heels of your hands to rock it away from you. Now give it a 90 degree turn and continue that process of folding it in half and rocking it away from you. Now as you do this you're likely going to need to add a little more flour as it starts sticking to the counter. And if you have a bench scraper you can kind of scrape the dough as it sticks to the counter up. Add a little more flour and continue kneading. Now this is a very soft dough so I encourage you to refrain from adding too much flour at the beginning of the kneading process because as you knead it it will become a little more elastic and less sticky. So you can always add more flour but it's hard to go back the other way if you do add too much. Now you want to continue this kneading process for about 10 minutes until you get a really soft and elastic dough. You are done kneading your dough when it is really smooth and elastic. It still has a slightly sticky texture when you touch it and if you press down on it with your fingers it immediately springs back up. So that's how you know you've developed a really nice gluten structure. And now we are going to let this dough rest and rise. So what has happened is the yeast has been hydrated which woke it up and we gave it a food source with the flour and the sugar in our dough and now it needs some time to start feeding. Yeast is a living organism. It's actually a fungus and it was asleep in its dry state but now it is awake. And as it starts feeding it is going to produce carbon dioxide gas as well as alcohol. Now these two things are going to help flavor our yeast dough and the carbon dioxide gas is what is going to make our bread rise. So it needs some time to do that. So I am going to transfer my dough just right back into the mixing bowl that I mixed it in and I'm going to cover it with some plastic wrap and let it rise. So we want to let this rise until it is about double in size. Now if you did use the rapid rise yeast this should take about 45 minutes to an hour and if you used the active dry yeast this will take about 90 minutes to 2 hours. Now that's really depending on how warm your kitchen is and how warm the liquid was when you added it to your dough. So if you do have a really warm kitchen your dough is going to rise much quicker than if you have a really cold kitchen. So you just need to watch it and when it's about double in size we will come back and shape the dough. I made this dough earlier and it has had about an hour to rise and you can see it is really puffy and there's a lot of air bubbles in it and that is from the carbon dioxide gas that has been produced from the yeast feeding on the starches in the flour and the sugar. So we can go ahead and shape this dough now. Now we are going to lightly deflate it by just pressing down on it in the center and bringing the sides in. And now we can go ahead and shape our dinner rolls. So give your countertop just a very light dusting of flour, you shouldn't need too much, and scrape that dough out. And now we are going to divide it into our roll portions. Now I like to make 16 for something like a Thanksgiving dinner because you don't want a really huge roll when you're going to have all this other food. So I'm just going to eyeball it here and I'm going to divide my dough in half and then each half in half and then each quarter into four pieces. So we get 16 rolls. So I have 16 pieces of dough that are all about the same size and now we are going to shape them into rolls. Now I'm placing a piece of plastic wrap over the pieces that I'm not working with just so they don't dry out while we're shaping. And we're going to start with one piece of dough and what you want to do is just sort of pull down on the sides of the dough and bring it down underneath to create a little bit of a seam on the bottom, almost like a little purse. Now once you have that shaped, you want to put that down on your countertop on a part of the countertop that doesn't have any flour and you're going to create a C with your hand and cup it around the roll and just work it back and forth until you get a smooth surface. Like that. Now this is creating some tension on the outside of the dough to create a little bit of a skin and this is really going to help hold those gases in so that they get a really nice rise to them. So I'll show you that one more time. Take a piece of dough, go ahead and pull down all around on the sides, bring that down to the middle underneath to create a bit of a purse seam and set that seam side down on the countertop and use your hand in the shape of a C to roll it until you get a really nice smooth surface. Just like that. Now I'm going to position these 4 across and 4 down, giving them a little bit of space in between so they can rise and I'm going to shape all of these rolls. Once your rolls are shaped, you want to cover them with plastic wrap and then they need to rise a second time. Now you have 2 options for this step of the process. You could let them rise at room temperature and then bake them as soon as they have risen or you could put them in your refrigerator and let them slowly rise overnight. Now cold temperatures really slow down yeast and if you do put them in the refrigerator, you can let them rise anywhere from about 12 to 18 hours. So if you are making these for something like Thanksgiving or Christmas, it's really nice to prep them the night before and then you can bake them the next day. Now I'm going to bake mine same day so I'm going to let these rise at room temperature and because I used the quick rise yeast, this should take about 45 minutes to 1 hour for them to rise and get about double in size again. Or if you did use the active dry yeast, that might take 90 minutes before they are ready to go in the oven. So I'm going to let these rise and then we will prep them for baking. So my rolls are finished rising. They are nice and puffy and doubled in size and now they are ready to go into the oven. So I am going to brush them with an egg wash, which is just 1 egg whisked with 1 tablespoon of water and this is optional, but it's going to give your rolls that really nice shiny glistening top when they come out of the oven. It looks really nice and pretty, but you can just leave them as is. My oven is preheated to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and we're just going to bake these until they are golden brown. So I just pulled my yeast rolls out of the oven. They are golden brown. They look perfect and they are soft and tender and just a little bit chewy, just a little bit sweet and they are going to go perfectly with your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner or really just any meal that you want a really nice dinner roll with. Now I hope this tutorial really helped make yeast rolls seem really approachable for you and if you enjoyed this video, make sure you give it a thumbs up. I'm always happy to answer any of your questions, so make sure you leave those in the comments section and if you aren't already subscribed, you can hit that subscription button and ring the notification bell so you never miss a video. You can also follow me at BakerBettie on Instagram and on Facebook and next week is Thanksgiving so I won't have a new video for you then, but I'll be back the week after with a new recipe tutorial. I'll see you guys then and have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Bye!