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Grant Crilly is the Executive Director and cofounder of ChefSteps. Grant is a classically trained chef and, prior to ChefSteps, he worked on the award-winning cookbook series Modernist Cuisine and cooked at various restaurants, including L’Astrance in Paris, Busaba in Mumbai, and Mistral Kitchen in Seattle.

Grant Crilly

Home cooks are often wary of baking bread—there’s a notion that you need a special oven to get bakery-quality results. And the truth is, most home ovens lack two key components that result in the soft, pull-apart interior and browned, crisped exterior one wants in a dinner roll: a steam injector, which adds steam to the oven to allow the dough to expand sufficiently as it cooks—a process known as oven-spring—and enough mass, which enables the environment to stay appropriately hot and moist. Here, we’ve adapted a technique, popularized by Jim Lahey at Sullivan Street Bakery, that essentially turns a covered heavy cast-iron pot, like those made by Le Creuset or Staub, into a bread oven. After mixing, proofing, and shaping basic dinner roll dough, we bake our rolls in the covered pot for about 20 minutes. As they cook, the sealed environment of the heavy pot ensures that the rolls bake in the humidity and heat critical for oven-spring. Then, to achieve the golden-brown crust, we uncover the pot and let the tops bake until their color deepens.

Dinner Rolls