Soft Milk Rolls

Whisk the flour, yeast, sugar and fine salt together in a large bowl.

Beat the egg into the warmed milk until no streaks of yolk are left.

Pour the milk and egg into the flour and mix to a rough dough with no dry flour left in the bowl.

Expect an enriched dough — one carrying milk, butter, egg and sugar alongside the flour — to feel slacker and stickier than a plain bread dough, and to take several minutes longer to come together.

Rest the dough for 10 minutes so the flour hydrates.

Knead for 8-10 minutes, until it is smooth and stops clinging to your hands.

Add the softened butter a few cubes at a time, working each addition in before the next goes in.

Keep the butter back until the dough is smooth. Fat coats the flour proteins and stops them linking up, so butter worked in with the liquid leaves a dough that tears instead of stretching however long it is kneaded.

Knead for a further 6-8 minutes, until the dough is glossy and elastic and a corner stretched between your fingers goes thin enough to see light through before it tears — the windowpane test.

Cover the bowl and prove at room temperature for 1.5-2 hours, until doubled and domed.

Give it the longer time it asks for. Sugar and fat both slow yeast down, so this takes roughly twice as long to rise as the everyday white tin loaf in this collection, which is the same family of dough without the enrichment.

Butter a 23x33cm tin, corners included.

Tip the dough onto a lightly floured worktop.

Divide it into 12 pieces of about 80g.

Roll each piece under a cupped palm on an unfloured patch of the worktop, until the surface pulls tight into a smooth ball.

Set the balls in the tin in four rows of three, leaving a couple of centimetres between them.

Cover and prove for 45-60 minutes, until the rolls have swollen into each other and a floured fingertip leaves a dent that fills back slowly.

Heat the oven to 180C/350F once the second prove is halfway through.

Beat the egg yolk with the tablespoon of milk.

Brush the tops thinly with the wash, letting none of it pool in the gaps between the rolls, where it sets into a rubbery skin.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the tops are deep gold and a skewer pushed into the middle roll comes out clean, or the centre reads 90C/194F.

Resist a hotter oven than that. The sugar, milk and egg in this dough colour long before the crumb sets, and at 220C/425F the tops are dark while the middle rolls are still raw.

Cool in the tin for 10 minutes.

Lift the slab of rolls out onto a rack.

Pull them apart at the seams rather than cutting them.

Split one warm for the soft scrambled eggs in this collection, since the close crumb holds a loose curd where toast lets it run off the edge.

Keep the rest in a sealed bag for two days. The fat in the crumb slows staling, so they hold their softness a day longer than a lean dough would.