Recipe: Parker House Swolls

For subscriber eyes only

This recipe was something I created the other day, after having had a particularly nice Parker House roll at Puritan Oyster Bar here in Cambridge. The Puritan buns were fluffy and buttery and delicious, but just shaped like rolls, which isn’t very traditional. The extra joy of a Parker House roll is how the buttered and folded-over dough pulls apart where the butter was applied, and these lacked that. But I don’t love the Parker House shape—a round of dough patted flat and then folded in half—I find it kind of boring, and also it’s not meant to be baked snuggled together in a pan like the sorts of dinner rolls I prefer.

So I decided to make something I came to call Parker House swolls, since they are swirled rolls. I make them just like the traditional ones, but shape the dough into strips, add butter, and spiral them. They are very good, the sort of thing you can inhale half a pan of before you realize what you have done.

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—Andrew