The Best Potato Rolls in choose your own adventure shapes

The best potato rolls are soft fluffy airy rolls made with mashed potato, rolled up into 4 different shapes with 1 dough: crescent rolls, fan rolls, Parker House rolls, and cloverleaf rolls.

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I’ve made crescent rolls for Thanksgiving every year from age 14. As much as my family loves the crescent roll recipe I’ve used since then (from the Farmhouse Cookbook by Susan Hermann Loomis), there’s both more doughs out there and more fun shapes! I wanted to write this post to give you some options because I both love shaping dough and let you know how creative you can get without much extra work.

The dough in question for these rolls is similar to that of my potato garlic knots. Mashed potato makes for a pillowy soft roll and all the extra butter brushed on the rolls makes for luscious rolls that are perfect for enjoying along with your Turkey Day dishes.

Best of all, you can make these rolls now, freeze them and warm them up when you need them for Thanksgiving. I’m all about making things easy on big Holidays!

Let’s get shaping!

The Best Potato Rolls

Why potato rolls are better than regular dinner rolls

1. Starch: The cooked starches in mashed potatoes are bound together with water, allowing you to add more moisture to a bread than you could in a bread with flour alone.
2. Flavor: Potatoes add a hint of natural sweetness and earthy goodness you won’t get from a regular roll recipe.
3. Make-ahead marvels: Another thing that the starch from the potatoes does is to create a bread that keeps longer and is extra soft without being gooey or waterlogged. I love this fact on days like Thanksgiving when you’re trying so hard for things to be at their best. Additionally, you can make the dough up to 2 days ahead of time and pop it in the fridge to use when you can.
4. Toast: I’m an avowed toast lover, and these rolls taste AWESOME when they’re a little stale split open and toasted. Good toast should have fine little holes throughout its texture that hold onto whatever you spread on it. Potato rolls have this in spades!

4 classic dinner roll shapes: choose your own adventure!

I love shaping dough! If you do too, see my Potato Garlic Knots, homemade burger buns, buttermilk milk bread rolls, for more bread shaping adventures.

For this recipe, I wanted to show you how to make 4 of the most classic dinner roll shapes:

1. Crescents: Fun and easy to make. Rolling up crescents makes them my students’ favorite shape to make. Crescent dinner rolls give you all the fun of making croissants without the long rise time.
2. Parker House rolls: These are so simple and satisfying to make. A simple circle of dough gets folded over on itself for a poofy roll that wants to be lavished in butter.
3. Fan rolls: These are so fun! Layers of dough get stacked up together in a muffin tin with butter in between each. Pulling these apart as you eat them is almost a mediative process.
4. Cloverleaf rolls: 3 tiny balls get baked together in a buttered muffin tin. I maybe should not say this, but if you have people in your family who throw rolls across the table, cloverleafs are good candidates for making it being sturdy and easy to catch!

For this recipe, you certainly can make all 4 shapes, or just pick your favorite. There’s no bad choices here!

Helpful tools for making potato rolls

1. Potato mashing implement: you can use anything. A potato ricer will give you the finest texture, but a food mill, a fork, or a hand potato masher all work too.
2. Bench scraper: Helps divide up dough for cloverleaf and Parker House rolls.
3. Pizza wheel: Used to cut strips and triangles from the dough for crescents and fan rolls.
4. Baking sheets: for baking the Parker House and crescent rolls.
5. Muffin tin: for baking the cloverleaf and fan rolls.
6. Parchment
7. Pastry brush
8. Ruler: I keep a quilting ruler in one of my kitchen drawers just for baking. I use it for things like homemade puff pastry.
9. Rolling pin

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