This Refrigerator Rolls Recipe gives you the perfect formula for enjoying fresh bread every day of the week – without leaving the house.

Once you make up the dough it is stored in the fridge for up to a week. Fancy a fresh roll? Simply pull the appropriate amount of mixture from the fridge, leave it a couple of hours to rise, and then bake off in a hot oven.
Enjoy the aroma of fresh bread cooking every day!
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Nana Ling's recipe
The original recipe comes from a supplement of the Australia Home Journal dated March 1960. I found this supplement in Nana Ling's recipe clipping collection.
I've tested and tweaked the recipe a little, so please keep scrolling until you reach the recipe card at the end of this post. You might notice, for example, that the original recipe has an egg in the ingredients but not in the method. I tried it without the egg and liked the result so have removed the egg from the recipe.
Ingredient notes
To make these rolls, you'll need all the traditional bread-making ingredients – flour, yeast, salt and water. You'll also need a little butter and sugar and traditional rolled oats.
How to make Refrigerator Rolls
The step-by-step instructions are at the bottom of this post in the recipe card.
However, it really is a simple recipe which just involves mixing the ingredients together in a bowl in three stages.
The important thing to remember about the method is that you need to get the timing right:
- the dough needs to rest overnight in the fridge before you can use it
- the rolls need to rise for about 2 hours before being baked off
- the dough makes 8 small rolls and can be stored for up to one week in the fridge.
I baked my rolls up in two separate batches of four.
When you take the mixture from the fridge, you just knead it a little, roll into a ball and place on a greased tray.
Into the oven, and before you know it... you'll be enjoying these sweet, fluffy dinner rolls.
More bread recipes
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Refrigerator Rolls Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 cup traditional oats
- ½ cup boiling water
- 115 grams butter (room temperature, chopped into cubes)
- ⅓ cup sugar (75 grams)
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ½ cup lukewarm water
- 2 teaspoons instant dried yeast
- 2 cups plain flour (sifted)
Instructions
- Combine oats, boiling water, butter, sugar and salt into a bowl and stir to melt the butter and combine.
- Set aside until lukewarm. This should only take 5 minutes.
- Combine the lukewarm water and yeast and then add to mixture and stir to combine.
- Add flour and mix until you have a soft dough. Cover and store in the fridge overnight.
- Divide mixture into 8 parts (one for each roll). When you wish to bake off a roll, take the number of pieces you require from the fridge. Knead each roll a little and then shape into a small ball. Place onto a greased tray and allow to rise in a warm place for approximately 2 hours (or until nearly double in size).
- Bake in a hot oven (200 degrees celsius, fan-forced) for 20 minutes.
- Serve warm with butter.
Notes
- the dough needs to rest overnight in the fridge before you can use it
- the rolls need to rise for about 2 hours before being baked off
- the dough makes 8 small rolls and can be stored for up to one week in the fridge.
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