Reading about this technique was fascinating and I decided to experiment; since I make many batches of rolls over the holidays, the timing was perfect. I first made the soft cinnamon rolls as written and found them "too" soft once baked, and harder to work with than my fine-tuned, well-loved recipe, which is a moderately high hydration dough without eggs or sugar. So I decided to perform the ultimate experiment and made 2 side-by-side batches of my recipe, painstakingly ensuring that they were exactly the same (weighing all ingredients to the gram) and then altering one of the batches to the tangzhong method. There was virtually no difference in handling during rolling or baking. On morning 1 (rolls freshly made, still warm) I did a blind taste test for a group of 8, and 2 thought the Tangzhong ones might have been the slightest bit "fluffier" (not necessarily in a good way) but the rest couldn't discern any difference . On morning two, no one could tell any difference. I hid a few of each variety and stored them until morning four. Once again, there was absolutely NO difference noted between the two batches, and both were still surprisingly soft and tasty. (They never last this long in real life!)
Maybe for non-enriched doughs this technique really makes a difference, but not for my already high hydration enriched dough. I'm wondering if the reports of better cinnamon rolls are really based on the higher hydration rather than the Tangzhong technique.
My current cinnamon roll recipe remains the one to beat... I'm still interested in trying the milk rolls though!

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