How To Make Gluten-Free Dinner Rolls

There’s something wonderful about a basket full of warm dinner rolls on the dinner table, but for many gluten-free eaters, the bread basket has been off-limits for too long. Not anymore! This easy recipe makes rich and tender rolls that gluten-eaters and gluten-free eaters adore.

To achieve the best flavor and texture, this recipe skips commercial gluten-free flour blends and instead uses a simple blend of millet flour and tapioca starch plus a little xanthan gum to replace wheat flour (without the xanthan gum, the batter would be runny and the rolls won’t rise.)

Before mixing the dough, take a second to whisk the dry ingredients together. This step ensures the following two things:

• The salt never comes in direct contact with the yeast, which can kill it.
• The xanthan gum never comes in direct contact with the liquids. If that happens, the batter can get lumpy.

When you whisk the dry ingredients together, the yeast stays happy and alive, and the batter remains smooth.

Without gluten to hold everything together, gluten-free yeast dough doesn’t look anything like traditional wheat dough; it looks more like a very thick cake batter.

Since the dough is so thick, it’s best to mix it with a stand mixer. Use the paddle attachment, not the dough hook, for this job. The dough won’t form a cohesive ball. It should look like a smooth, thick cake batter.

Hand-mixer method: If you don’t have a stand mixer, use a sturdy handheld mixer set to medium-high speed to mix the dough.

This recipes makes “scoop-and-bake” rolls since there’s no dough rising in a bowl (bulk fermentation). Instead, the dough gets scooped directly onto a parchment-lined baking sheet and rises there.

Muffin scoop: If you have a muffin scoop, use it to scoop the dough. If you don’t, a greased 1/2 cup measuring cup works great.

To prevent the dough from drying out and forming a skin while it rises, cover the pan lightly with a piece of greased plastic wrap. Don’t cover the pan too tightly or the plastic wrap will impede the dough from rising.

These rolls take about 45 minutes to rise. They’ll spread as they rise and the dough should look puffy and soft. Since these rolls have no gluten to provide structure, they won’t rise as high as wheat rolls; an inch or so is about right.

During the first 10 minutes of baking, oven-spring occurs. As the yeast warms up, it goes into a hyperactive mode and produces its final burst of CO2 before dying off. The rolls might split a little when oven-spring occurs; this gives them a rustic appearance and isn’t something to fret over. For a wheat-based roll, we’d score the roll before baking, but since this dough has the texture of a thick batter, scoring the dough before baking doesn’t really make a difference.

One of the main complaints about gluten-free bread is that it can have a gummy texture. While this recipe is formulated to avoid that, it’s important to cool the rolls on a wire cooling rack. This allows the steam to escape from the rolls and prevents soggy/gummy rolls.