Your Thanksgiving Dinner Needs These No-Knead Dinner Rolls

These No-Knead Dinner Rolls:

There’s a time and a place for chewy, crusty homemade bread. Bread that requires 12 minutes of constant kneading to make. Bread that’s full of glorious, stretchy gluten. That place is not the Thanksgiving dinner table. Crusty bread makes a killer day-after turkey sandwich, but it sure makes a lousy dinner roll.

Dinner rolls are meant to be soft and squishy—the sort of bread you can load with butter, mop up gravy, and cram into your mouth. That’s where no-knead bread fits in. It’s easy on your arms and easy on the gluten, making it perfect for dinner rolls.

The average bread recipe can be turned into buns, but the trap is that those recipes use high-gluten flours to build up the strength necessary for a chewy, bouncy texture and good rise. For the perfect soft dinner roll, the gluten should be just enough to hold the structure, and there should be shortening agents–like eggs and butter–involved to keep it soft and hydrated.

No-knead breads aren’t kneaded (surprise!), and this recipe uses all-purpose flour, eggs, and butter. All of these factors ensure the gluten content is lower than a lean, crusty bread, and that the gluten development is kept to a minimum.