Parker House Rolls

Happy New Year! If you’re cooking up a traditional New Year’s Day feast of pork, sauerkraut & black eyed-peas, these Parker House rolls would be the perfect compliment to your meal.

The quest for perfect homemade rolls is one my family has been on for quite a while. Once in 1996 my Mom made some amazing Parker House rolls at Thanksgiving – but she lost the recipe. Tragedy. In the years that followed she tried to recreate that magic, but was never able to.

This year as we were planning for Thanksgiving and deciding who would take responsibility for certain dishes, I volunteered to make rolls. I didn’t have a plan or a recipe in mind. But just my luck, The Pioneer Woman shared a recipe for Parker House rolls the very day after I had volunteered to make them. Search over! I followed her recipe pretty closely, but I did scale back on the sugar a bit.  I then used Joy The Baker’s method for forming the the rolls.

The recipe will yield 48 rolls.  And if (like me), you don’t have an army to feed, you can cut the dough in half prior to rising and put one batch in the freezer.  I did this on Thanksgiving and it was nice that on Christmas Day I could just defrost the dough and make another batch of rolls.

I’ve not experimented with bread baking very much, but these rolls were so simple and delicious that I’ll be making other types of homemade bread in 2011.

2 Responses to “Parker House Rolls”

1. Sarah says:

   January 2, 2011 at 4:08 pm

   Ha–one of the topics of conversation around our Christmas table in Muscle Shoals, Alabama was the contemporary lack of a decent homemade biscuit. Apparently, social pressure to cut out the lard has made it impossible to fabricate the old fashion fluffy texture in a regular kitchen. If you could take on the challenge, I know Tot would be enternally grateful . Hope you had a Merry Christmas! So sorry I didn’t call–could we set up a phone date soon?

   Reply
   • Sarah says:

     January 2, 2011 at 4:10 pm

     make that “eternally”

     Reply