The 15 Best Thanksgiving Rolls, Cookies, and Breads for Your Holiday Table

Bread isn’t the flashiest part of Thanksgiving dinner: When I’m trying to fit turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and a thousand other dishes into my stomach, the extra carbs feel like wasted space. But bread is an essential part of the meal. How else are you going to soak up every drop of sauce or prepare leftover sandwiches on Friday? We’ve rounded up 15 recipes to help you fill your bread basket with buttery dinner rolls, nutty cornbread, chewy angel cookies, or any of our other favorite breads.

November 2024

Yeast breads and rolls

Raised Pumpkin Bread

Pumpkin puree replaces the water in this otherwise classic white sandwich bread. The pumpkin gives the bread a nice orange glow, without making it too sweet. It’s a versatile bread that will add a seasonal touch to your Thanksgiving table.

The Best Rolls (Soft, Crispy and Chewy)

These rolls are soft on the inside but have a crackly crust sturdy enough to hold up to all the mashed potatoes and gravy you throw at them. We achieve this crust using a technique that will be familiar to anyone who has made bagels: boiling the dough to gelatinize its starch before baking.

Parker House Rolls

These buttery, restaurant-quality Parker House rolls are surprisingly easy to make at home. With a top layer of melted butter and a sprinkle of sea salt, they’re nothing short of trophy-worthy.

Detachable stuffing rolls

Rolls are often considered an afterthought of a meal, but they have enough flavor to be a star in their own right thanks to classic stuffing ingredients like sausage, celery, and sage. They’re also very simple: With so many intense ingredients, we have no problem using slightly bland store-bought pizza dough instead of making it from scratch.

Butter and clover leaf buns

These pull-apart buns are everything a bun should be: soft, tender, and perfect for soaking up sauce.

Gluten-free potato bread

You don’t need gluten to make a good loaf of bread: this one has a beautifully structured and elastic crumb thanks to a mixture of gluten-free flour and starchy cooked potatoes. Mixing flour is a little complicated, but you can make a big batch and save it to use in just about any recipe that calls for all-purpose flour.

Sourdough Bread (Sourdough Bread)

If you’ve been working on your sourdough skills, Thanksgiving is the perfect time to put them to good use. This recipe and technique produces a deeply flavorful bread with a slight tangy flavor. If you’re new to the world of sourdough, our sourdough starter recipe will help you get started.

Cornbread

Sweet and Soft Northern-Style Cornbread

I’m a born and raised Yankee, so I like my cornbread sweet and cake-like. This recipe suits my tastes thanks to its 50/50 blend of yellow cornmeal and all-purpose flour, plus a generous amount of sugar (the sour cream and buttermilk keep it from being too sweet). The browned butter makes the recipe even better.

Unsweetened Southern Style Cornbread

Do you prefer unsweetened southern-style cornbread to northern cornbread? To do it right, you’ll need to source high-quality stone-ground cornmeal: the flavor and texture of mass-market cornmeal simply can’t compete. Beyond that, the recipe is pretty simple: salt, baking soda, baking powder, buttermilk, eggs, and butter (or bacon grease).

Orange-Cranberry Cornbread

We’re going back up North here, giving cornbread a Thanksgiving twist with the berries and orange you’d find in a classic cranberry sauce. We use light brown sugar instead of white for a slight molasses note and add more than we would for our regular Nordic-style cornbread to account for the tartness of the cranberries.

Cookies

Homemade cookies

Natural yogurt replaces buttermilk in this flaky, golden biscuit. They have just enough baking soda to add a little punch so they brown and rise, while the yogurt ensures they stay moist while cooking.

Super Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits

Our version of a laminated biscuit stays true to tradition: It’s hard to improve on a soft, flaky biscuit with the perfect amount of buttermilk flavor. We depart from some other recipes by using butter instead of shortening, which produces a more tender and flavorful result.

No-Fail 2-Ingredient Cream Cookies

As good as they are, our flaky cookies might take a little more work than you’re looking for for Thanksgiving morning. This recipe is much simpler: it starts with our already simple cream biscuits, but uses self-rising flour to reduce the ingredient list to just two items. They can be rolled if you like, but make them cookie style and you can have them ready in just 20 minutes.

The best sweet potato cookies

Thick, fluffy sweet potato puree makes these colorful cookies tender, moist and light. Despite their vibrant color, sweet potato cookies have as classic a buttery flavor as possible.

Yeast Angel Cookies

These cookies should rise overnight in the refrigerator, making them a perfect Thanksgiving side dish. Mix all the ingredients the night before and all you have to do is throw them in the oven Thanksgiving morning.

November 2018