So many Parker House roll recipes call for shortening. What does shortening do for the dough? Are you better off just using butter - as PJ talked about when she compared butter and shortening pie crust to all-butter pie crust. Shortening makes sense in pie dough for its higher melting point. Just wondering if a yeast roll benefits from it. Hi, Michelle. So many recipes from the 30s and 40s onward call for shortening, it's easy to wonder what's up. There's no reason that shortening has to be in a dinner roll recipe. It's a holdover from the times when food manufacturers were the ones writing most recipes, and if they were selling shortening, that's what they called for. Before that, shortening was more of a generic term for any fat that would shorten the strands of gluten in a yeast bread. So butter is both better for you and tastier. PJ, smart lady that she is, went there. Susan

• Reply