Buttery Dinner Roll Recipe for the Bread Machine
Last Updated on April 9, 2020
These rolls are hit anytime, but they’re especially great for holiday dinners. They’re so soft and buttery. At our house, we call them butter buns. Yum!
Making Homemade Dinner Rolls
Note that this recipe is for a two-pound bread machine. It uses the dough setting.
Follow the instructions that came with your bread machine in terms of which ingredients to put in the machine first. I used the basic setting with a medium crust.
Homemade Dinner Roll Ingredients in the Bread Machine
Check on the dough after five or ten minutes of kneading. Open top of the bread machine and look at how the dough is doing. It should be a smooth, round ball.
Here’s how the dough ball looked for this batch of buns.
If the dough is too dry add liquid a teaspoon at a time until it looks right. If it looks too wet, add flour a tablespoon at a time until it looks right.
When the dough is done put it on a lightly floured surface and divide it in half. Then you’ll keep dividing. The goal is to get 16 to 18 dinner rolls of appropriate size and shape.
Put the rolls on a greased cookie sheet. Cover the rolls with a clean, light-weight kitchen towel and let the rolls rise for half an hour.
Here’s how the buns look after rising for half an hour. Notice the bun at the back of the pan on the right. I’ve still got more to learn about shaping dough.
Remove the towel and put the rolls in a 375 degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes.
Move the cooked rolls to a rack to cool.
Buttery Dinner Roll Recipe
1 Cup water
1 Large egg
3 1/4 Cups bread flour
4 Tablespoons sugar
3 Tablespoons dry milk
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 Cup butter
1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast
Follow the instructions that came with your bread machine in terms of what ingredients to add first. (Missing your bread machine manual? I might be able to help.)
Use the dough setting of your bread machine.
Quick Dough Setting: If you’re short on time you can replace the 1 1/2 teaspoons of active dry yeast with 2 teaspoons of rapid rise yeast. Be sure to use the quick dough setting along with the rapid rise yeast.
I have made these rolls for about a year. Everyone loves them. I have started just using the recipe for my loaf bread. Thanks for the easy yumminess!
And thank you for the kind words!
Wow! This is almost exactly like my dinner roll recipe! Only difference is that I use buttermilk in place of the water, and dry milk solids. I usually make it the night before, taking the dough out and measuring the weight so I can get exactly 24 balls of equal weight. Then I roll (no pun intended!) the dough into little balls, and put TWO each into silicone pans. Then I cover the rolls with plastic wrap, and put into my 38°F fridge over night. I take them out on Thanksgiving day, let them rise till full (about an hour) and bake them same as you, then brush them with butter after they come out of the oven. By doing each side a day, all I have to do is cook the turkey on Thanksgiving Day! Thanks again for having such a great site!
And thanks to you for all your great comments! I hope you and yours have a happy Thanksgiving!!
Can you use regular flour instead of bread flour?
It all depends on how much gluten is in your flour. This article on flour types talks more about that.
If you’re feeling adventurous, you could just try it. The worst that would happen is that the dinner rolls wouldn’t rise as much as usual.
Hi love all of your recipes! Can I make a loaf of bread with this instead of rolls? Thank you
Hey Cathy, Thanks for the kind words! I haven’t tried making this as a loaf of bread. I would guess that it wouldn’t work because the dough is just too wet and sticky to make a good loaf of bread. But if you try this and I’m wrong, let me know. 🙂
Does this dough freeze well, so I can make my rolls for Xmas and bake fresh
Trying these tonight! If you want to make up dough a day ahead, what’s the best way to store it?
Great question! I’m looking into it, but at this point, I don’t know.
All I do is cover the rolls loosely with plastic wrap, then place in the fridge until needed, then give them about an hour to fully rise. Then bake as per directions; and I like to brush them with butter after they come out of the oven (I also use buttermilk instead of water, and dry milk solids), so they’re ready to eat!
Are you able to stuff these dough with meat before covering it to rise for some hot dog bread as a quick snack?
The dough is too fluffy for that. BUT check out this recipe. This is exactly what you’re looking for.
How well do these freeze?
They freeze really well. We just took some out of the freezer the other night.
This is my go to recipe for dinners rolls. In fact, I have a couple of family members who request a batch of them as birthday and Christmas presents. Thank-you for this amazing recipe.
I don’t have dry milk. Can I substitute low fat milk for dry milk? If so how much milk do I use and do I eliminate the water? I saw a conversion that 3 tablespoons of dry milk equals 3/4 cup of milk. Not sure if I should still use 1/4 cup of water to get the same amount of liquids. Thanks
Hi Paul, I’ve always used dry milk. If you end up doing a substitution let everyone know what you did and how it turned out. I’m sure you’re not the only one who finds themselves out of powdered milk.
My recipe is very similar to Marsha’s with one exception. I use buttermilk, instead of water and dry milk solids. I weigh my ingredients, so I use 240 gms of buttermilk warmed, which is about a cup. Hope that this helps!
Love the site! Thank you for all the great recipes. Have a question for you…what brand baking sheets do you use? They look like restaurant supply….
Hi Marie, Thanks for the kind words. I’m glad you like the site. The baking sheets I use are called half racks or half sheets. They’re larger than regular cookie sheets. I got my last one at Amazon – Nordic Ware Natural Aluminum Commercial Baker’s Half Sheet
I just got this zojirushi when my old welbit died. I can’t figure out how to set the zojirdushi so that it shuts off after the knead and first rise. I use it to make rolls and things that require me to get the dough out. Can you tell me how? I have tried following the instructions in the book to no avail,
Thank you,
Linda
Hi Linda, You’ve got a couple of options. Your machine should had a “dough” setting. That’s what I use when I need to work with the dough. However it has not one, but two rises in it. If you’d like something different then you’ll need to program your Zo using the Home Made function.
Marsha. My machine has the 2 rises as well. Do you let your machine finish with the 2 rises or do you remove the dough after the first rise? I’ve never made rolls or worked with dough before.
Good question! Leave the dough in the machine through the entire dough cycle. (It’ll go through both rises in the machine.) Once the cycle is complete (it takes almost two hours in my machine) remove the dough and shape it into rolls. Let the rolls rise one more time and then pop them into the oven.
Thanks so much for this recipe. I’ve tried so many other recipes which were not what I was looking for, but this one is the best. Buttery, soft, yummy! EVERYONE loves these and they want more!
I’m so glad you like them. We feel the same way about this recipe. 🙂