The Best Store-Bought Frozen Dinner Roll Brand Is Ironically One Of The Worst As Well

Freshly baked rolls can transform easy weeknight dinners into cozy, carby, farmhouse tableaus. They can turn a basic, whole roasted chicken into a veritable feast, and even give some shine to an otherwise ho-hum leftover meatloaf. You can make lovely dinner rolls from scratch with about a half dozen ingredients in a few hours' time. Or you can approximate the same aesthetic, taste, and homey vibe via the frozen variety, provided you know which ones to buy. But even that can be trickier than it seems. Our ranking of five store-bought frozen dinner rolls actually landed one brand in the top and near-bottom spots.

Rhodes Warm & Serve Soft White Rolls took our list's No. 1 position. But a separate product from the same company, Rhodes Dinner Rolls, straggled in at second to last. One could easily be forgiven for mistaking one for the other in the grocery store or supermarket, but there was a notable difference once they were unboxed and subjected to Chowhound's evaluation metrics. Each option we tested was made according to package instructions. They were sampled alone and with the benefit of a bit of butter. Ultimately, rolls were graded for convenience, texture, and taste, with price and apparent quality also in play. And, while Rhodes Warm & Serve Soft White Rolls won each category versus the rest, its dinner rolls just didn't measure up.

Rhodes Warm & Serve Soft White Rolls' convenience gave them an edge over the competition, including its sister dinner rolls. The warm-and-serve rolls, as the name implies, needed only to be arranged on a baking sheet and heated in the oven before they were ready to plate or pile in a basket. Rhodes Dinner Rolls, on the other hand, required a three- to five-hour rise before they could even begin to bake. Although less labor intensive, that can be longer than plenty of scratch-made roll recipes, which really puts a damper on a lot of the implicit ease of any purported convenience food.

The warm-and-serve white rolls were, of course, ready in a relative snap. Their taste and texture also outperformed both the brand companion and three other store-bought frozen rolls in contention. They also puffed up to a nice size with a properly fluffy interior that, together, can pass for something you might have been working on all day. You can also technically make the warm-and-serve white rolls in the microwave should you find yourself in a critical side-dish emergency but keep to the full 12- to 14-minute bake time for optimal tasty results.