Crusty, chewy loaves have their place, but holiday feasts are best served with a soft, pillowy dinner roll. Our Garlic-Parmesan Potato Bread Dinner Rolls are unfailingly plush, great for sopping up runaway gravy or tearing in half to make miniature turkey sandwiches. These rolls aren't just softer than the average bun, they stay soft. Even after they’ve cooled down—and long after most rolls begin to harden and dry out—these potato rolls retain they’re moisture, all thanks to the addition of instant mashed potato flakes.

Potato rolls are enticingly soft

Potato rolls, store-bought or otherwise, have a reputation for being especially tender. Unlike breads that get their plushness from warm, soft fats, these rolls start soft and stay soft, even after cooling. Potatoes have a high starch content and that starch is excellent at holding onto moisture. When you cook potatoes in water, the starch granules swell, retaining as much as possible. By incorporating these starches into bread dough, you get extra moisture without rendering the dough wet and soggy.

Instant mashed potatoes are faster than fresh

If moisture is so important, why do we use dry instant mashed potato flakes instead of freshly mashed potatoes? The answer is ease and speed. To use freshly mashed potatoes in bread dough, you need to boil, peel and press the cooked potatoes through a ricer to ensure a fine and uniform texture. That’s already quite the commitment, before you even get to measuring your flour.

Dry instant mashed potato flakes, however, have already gone through that entire process. The only difference is they’ve been spread paper thin and dehydrated, leaving them fully primed for absorbing liquid—and our recipe has plenty of it.

Make them in advance

My favorite feature of these dinner rolls (besides the garlic- and rosemary-infused salted butter) is that you can schedule most of the hands-on work to be done the day before your big dinner. Mix the dough and do the bulk proof step as instructed, then shape the dough and arrange the buns in a well-buttered dish. Cover it loosely, but securely, and immediately put it in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours.

Not only does this bit of extra fermentation time build flavor, it slows down the yeast so you can leave it overnight and pick up where you left off the next day, without the dough being over-proofed. A word of caution: Give your rolls plenty of time at room temperature the next day before baking. When the rolls come out of the fridge, they’ll be around 34°F to 40°F. Depending on the temperature of your home, it can take well over an hour for the rolls to shake off that chill and properly begin their second rise—even if the dough is in a warm area. My home is in the mid-60s these days and I had to wait a full two and a half hours before I could bake them. You know they’re proofed and ready to bake when they have doubled in size; any gaps between the rolls should be mostly filled in. When you gently press a roll, a shadow of your fingerprint will remain.

Once you’ve started baking and you get to the garlic-Parmesan butter step, I recommend using all of the buttery topping. Don’t stop once you’ve coated all the rolls, and be sure to let a little butter pool in all of the divots and cracks. The Parmesan cheese will gather in these areas, forming an irresistibly melty, herby-cheesy-butter mixture. I suspect the adjacent rolls will be the first to go.

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Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.