Texas Roadhouse Rolls (2024)

Soft, fluffy, and slightly sweet, these copycat Texas Roadhouse rolls are begging to be added to your dinner menu. Pair them with cinnamon honey butter for the perfect finish!

Several years ago, I set out to make a homemade version of Texas Roadhouse rolls. I immediately knew that I wanted to adapt one of my great-grandmother’s yeast roll recipes for the project.

I didn’t anticipate that it would take me 4 tries because I kept forgetting to add the water to the recipe.

If you ever need a reminder that us recipe developers have off days, just hold onto the fact that it took me a full week of messing up this recipe to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Spoiler alert! Don’t leave the water out of this recipe. It won’t work.

But, as it turned out, it was all worth it in the long run. On the day I finally got it right, Alex came home from work, popped a warm roll into his mouth and asked, “Are these Texas Roadhouse rolls?!”

Copycat Texas Roadhouse Rolls

If you’ve never been to Texas Roadhouse before, you’re probably wondering what the big deal is with their yeast rolls.

Aside from the fact that Texas Roadhouse rolls are cut into squares or rectangles, they are light, fluffy, and sweet.

Yes, sweet! Not dessert-level sweet, but they have a distinctly sweet flavor to them.

The secret to those rolls and this recipe? Honey.

The rolls themselves have a whopped ½ cup of honey (which is a lot of sweetener as far as dinner rolls go), and they are served with the restaurant’s famous cinnamon honey butter.

I mean, sure – you can eat Texas Roadhouse rolls without the cinnamon honey butter and they’ll be delicious. You could opt to serve the rolls with jam, or instant pot persimmon butter. They’ll be delightful, in fact.

But if you really want to take things over the edge and bring home the Texas Roadhouse experience (sans the peanuts and country music), you’re going to need to slather those warm rolls in the delight that is cinnamon honey butter.

In fact, I’m pretty certain I don’t want any other type of butter in my life ever again.

Serve these rolls alongside everything from tortellini and white bean soup to baked chicken thighs. Or, of course, with your favorite steak dinner!

How to Make Texas Roadhouse Rolls

Don’t be intimidated by the ideas of making yeast rolls. This recipe uses instant yeast, which makes things just a smidge easier.

Texas Roadhouse rolls are made with an enriched dough, which means that the dough has eggs, milk, butter and sugar (or, in this case, honey) in it.

There’s a lot of sciencey stuff that changes when these ingredients are added to a yeast dough, but the most important one for you to know is that they can sometimes increase the rising time.

You’ll need around an hour for the first rise and 30 minutes for the second, even if using a “faster rising” yeast. Just make sure you budget yourself enough time and you’ll be golden.

Ingredients you’ll need

If you do a lot of baking, you probably have everything you need for these rolls already on hand.

You’ll need:

• 2 1/2 cups bread flour
• 4 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast (2 envelopes)
• 1 1/4 cups water
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1/3 cup unsalted butter
• 1 1/2 teaspoons fine sea salt
• 2 large eggs
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons salted butter, melted (optional)

This recipe uses a combination of bread flour and all-purpose flour. Bread flour gives baked goods more structure and chew than all-purpose flour.

To make these rolls like the ones you’d get at the restaurant, we want them to have a little bit of structure but still be soft and fluffy in the middle. Using a combination of the two flours helps us achieve that balance.

Make sure you’re using instant yeast in this recipe. Sometimes it will be branded as “quick rise” or “rapid rise” yeast.

You don’t want active dry yeast for these rolls. Save that for recipes like paska or pan de muerto.

Making this recipe

To make these Texas Roadhouse rolls, start by whisking together 2 cups of the bread flour with the yeast in the bowl of a stand mixer.

Then add the water, milk, honey, and butter to a saucepan. Heat this mixture over medium heat just until it is warm. Don’t worry if the butter doesn’t completely melt.

Using the dough hook attachment, run the mixer on low speed and pour the milk mixture into the bowl. Mix for 2 minutes, until well combined.

Add the remaining bread flour, salt, and eggs to the bowl. Mix on low until well combined.

Now, with the mixer on medium speed, add the all-purpose flour 1 cup at a time. You want the dough to pull away from the sides of the bowl.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead for 5-8 minutes, until the dough is smooth and elastic. Place the dough into a lightly greased bowl; cover the dough lightly with a clean tea towel and let it rise in a warm place for about 1 hour, or until doubled in size.

Once the dough has doubled, turn it out gently onto a lightly floured surface. Roll it into a large rectangle about ½-inch thick.

To make these copycat Texas Roadhouse Rolls truly like the originals, they need to be shaped into rectangles or squares, unlike other rolls like my Fluffy No-Knead Refrigerator Rolls.

To do this, use a dough blade or a pizza cutter to cut the dough into 24 squares.

Place the squares onto buttered baking sheets about 1.5 inches apart and let them rise for 30 more minutes. You want the rolls to be puffy.

While the rolls rise, preheat the oven to 350°F.

Bake the Texas Roadhouse rolls for 15-18 minutes, until they are golden. Brush them with the melted butter as soon as you take them out of the oven and serve them warm with cinnamon honey butter.

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