Parker House Rolls Offer a Delicious Nod to the Past

In the Everything Old is New Again Department, Parker House rolls—those fantastic fluffy dough balls dating back to Boston’s Parker House Hotel in the 1870s—are cropping up on area menus. From Loch Bar in Harbor East to Bunny’s Buckets & Bubbles in Fells Point, these carb creations are giving ordinary dinner rolls a serious run for their money.

Jessica Banner, the pastry chef at Gunther & Co. in Brewers Hill, has been making various versions of Parker House rolls for the past decade or so.

“I’ve made them in every restaurant I’ve ever worked in,” says Banner. “Over time, I’ve adapted the recipe—I just think they’re the perfect roll. I love enriched bread—give me brioche, give me challah, give me Parker House rolls.”

The type that Banner bakes has more butter than the original recipe.

“I add butter, butter, butter,” says the pastry chef, who makes 400 rolls a week. In addition to adding softened butter to the basic recipe of flour, sugar, salt, eggs, yeast, and milk, the bread gets brushed in melted butter several times during the process, including a final butter bath with a sprinkle of Maldon salt just before they’re brought—four to an order—to the table (where they’re served with butter on the side, of course).

And Banner’s rolls stand tall, while the traditional versions have a flatter oval shape that gets folded in half before baking.

The pastry chef’s rolls differ in one other way from those invented more than a century ago. “Legend has it that the chef was in a rush, so he angrily threw the tray of rolls in the oven,” says Banner. “The lore is that that’s how they got a little dented shape on top.”

Banner stays true to the form but achieves it in a different way.

“I roll them into little balls, take a bench scraper, and make a little dent on top of each one to get that characteristic shape,” she says. “I am not angrily throwing them into the oven.”