The Easiest Way to Plan for Leftovers Right Now

You know our Parker House Rolls? The fluffy, butter-brushed pull-apart buns of divinity pictured at the top of this page? Our food director Carla Lalli Music is pre-making batches of them (they’re freezable—but more on that later), using the same dough four different ways to make sure there are dinner roles at the main Thanksgiving event and plenty of warm buns for sandwich leftovers the day after. If you’re going to do one ounce of prep in anticipation of Thanksgiving this weekend, make it this.

Same Dough, Different Way
According to Music, you have a few different options:

1) The Classic. Fold the dough over so you end up with shingle-like strips in your pan. The bun you’ll get are highly pull apart-y and thin, the way you’d traditionally expect them to be.

2) The Time-Saver. Music sometimes feels like the recipe for the rolls can be “steppy.” As in, there are a ton of steps on how to cut and fold and roll and fold and cut that stand between you and your hot buns. What she does instead is take pieces of dough and roll them into balls, the way you would with other buns or cookies. Then put those dough balls in a 9″ by 13″ pan—so maybe three to a row, rather than 10—and bake. The buns you’ll get are still pull-apart, but they’ll more closely resemble dinner rolls. And they’ll make killer sandwich buns to house leftovers the day after.

 

3) The Milk Bread. Use a muffin tin. Place three small dough balls into each cup. You can use the same butter and salt finisher to brown the tops. But when these dome up, the finished breads will appear as individual rolls, each with three fluffy pull-apart tops.

4) The Flaky AF. Cut the dough into smaller rectangular strips. Stack and cut, stack and cut. Repeat. Flip that stack (of around four strips) onto its side and put into muffin tins. The dough in each muffin tin cup will puff and fan out into beautiful butter flake rolls with ridged tops. It looks fancy, feels flaky—and all you did was use that same dough.

Hot Buns
Did we mention that you can totally make the dough in advance (like, this weekend!) and freeze it? You can shape the rolls, put them in whichever tray you choose, and place in your freezer until Thanksgiving day (or the day after or whenever you want a fresh roll). When you’re ready to bake, you can bake them from frozen, says Music. Just from your freezer straight into the oven. They only take about 20 minutes to bake. And approximately 30 seconds to devour an entire tray. They’re seriously that good.