Soft Bread Rolls

These soft and fluffy bread rolls are perfect for hamburgers, sandwiches, dinner rolls, or anytime you want a soft white roll. Recipe for soft bread rolls with step-by-step photos.

Soft Bread Rolls

As a child, my parents owned a busy bakery in Australia. Like many Vietnamese businesses, it was open 7 days a week, 365 days a year. When I wasn’t at school, you could find me earning my pocket money at the bakery, whether serving customers behind the counters, slicing and bagging loaves of bread, decorating the “easy” cakes, or sweeping up breadcrumbs (an endless, fruitless task).

It was also my job to bag the bread rolls, often 6 rolls at a time. This served a dual purpose of keeping the buns fresher and softer for longer, but it also enticed customers to buy the rolls in units of 6. My mother was a smart businesswoman 😉

White Bread Rolls

Since moving to Switzerland, I have been a little disappointed to not find similar soft white bread rolls here, although I have found other types of bread which I like very much. The Swiss (and Europeans in general) prefer bread with a harder and chewier crust (such as the jaw-breaking Bürlibrot), and there is little available in the way of soft white bread rolls which are not brioche, unless you are after hot dog buns or similarly highly-processed buns.

I like to make these white bread rolls to go with hamburgers, mostly because this is the sort of bread I grew up eating at any Aussie barbecue. Back then, there were no such thing as soft and squishy American-style burger buns.

In recent years, the supermarkets in Switzerland have started to sell brioche hamburger buns, but I find them too sweet (and too highly processed) for my tastes. Call me old-fashioned, but I just want a normal white bun for my hamburgers – nothing buttery, nothing fancy.

Which is why these bread rolls are perfect. They taste just like the white rolls which my parents sold in their bakery (which is, in itself, a comfort factor for me), and they are great for those recipes where you need a nice, soft and fluffy bread roll.

Bread Roll Recipe

Below is my go-to recipe for soft and fluffy bread rolls which are perfect for tearing and sharing. The rolls are baked close together to allow them to rise and form tall bread rolls with a tenderly soft and pillowy centre.

If you are looking for soft dinner rolls, rolls for making sandwiches or hamburgers, or just soft bread rolls in general, this is the recipe you need.

These bread rolls taste just like bakery-style white bread rolls. The dough is slightly enriched with milk and butter to make the dough soft and pillowy.

This recipe can be used to make 9 hamburger-sized buns, 12 dinner rolls, or 15 mini dinner rolls.

How to Make Soft Bread Rolls

Step 1

Measure the flour, sugar, yeast and salt into the bowl of an electric stand mixer. Lightly mix the ingredients together.

Step 2

Slowly add the warm milk (you may not need all of it), and lightly beat everything with the dough hook until it comes together into a large ball of dough. Only add as much milk as you need to bring the ingredients together into a dough.

Step 3

Slowly incorporate the butter, one tablespoon at a time, until all of the butter has been used.

Then increase the speed to medium and continue kneading with the dough hook for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the dough is smooth and elastic.

Step 4

Lightly oil a large mixing bowl, and place the dough into the bowl. Cover the bowl with a clean tea towel and leave it somewhere warm for 1 to 1.5 hours, or until the dough has doubled in size.

Step 5

Once the dough has doubled in size, gently remove the dough from the bowl. The dough will deflate as you handle it.

Cut the dough into 12 equal portions. I like to do this by weighing the dough, and then dividing this number by 12 to get the weight for each ball of dough.

Roll each piece of dough into a smooth ball by pulling the edges together to form a ball, pinch the edges together, and roll gently until you have a smooth ball.

Place the balls of dough onto a lined baking tray. Place the buns somewhat close together so that they will touch each other after the second proofing.

Step 6

Place the tray of buns somewhere warm for about 30 minutes to puff up slightly. Note that, during baking, the buns will rise and expand even more.

Step 7

Preheat the oven to 220°C/390°F (without fan). Place a metal baking tray in the middle of the oven.

Brush the buns with some milk and sprinkle with sesame seeds and/or poppy seeds.

Bake the buns for 10 minutes.

Step 8

Reduce the oven temperature to 180°C/356°F (without fan).

Continue baking for 15 minutes, or until the bread rolls are nice and golden.

If the bread rolls are browning too quickly, loosely cover them with the a sheet of aluminium foil for the rest of the baking time. I generally find that I have to cover the buns with foil after 10-12 minutes of baking (from the start).

Tips for Making Bread Rolls

• Bake the rolls close together. For soft and fluffy buns, they need to be baked close together so that they can rise sufficiently in the oven. The taller the buns, the softer they will be.
• Make the dough the night before. Get a head start by making the dough the night before. Once the dough has had its first session of proofing, place the covered bowl into the fridge. The dough will continue to rise slightly overnight in the fridge, so make sure your bowl is big enough. The next day, portion the dough and continue with the rest of the recipe. As the dough will be cold from the fridge, the second proofing may take slightly longer. Theoretically, you can also portion the dough and leave the buns to proof overnight in the fridge. However, I find that sometimes the dough can proof too much overnight. For almost all types of bread, I prefer to keep an eye on the dough during the second proofing.

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