A Parker House Roll is made from an enriched dough, so very much in the same lane as say, a challah or a brioche. There’s some butter going on in there (a little extra in my recipe today, because more is more. amen), there is an egg, and there is some gorgeous, amber-sweet maple syrup. The syrup serves to give these rolls their truly wonderful depth of flavor, but it also acts as the requisite sugar here. Yeast, as it were, needs sugar in some form to bloom and grow and do its thing. The sugar (read: maple syrup) feeds the yeast. We’ll use a bit of salt (food tastes dead without it) in our homemade parker house rolls recipe, but you have to be careful when you add salt to a yeast-based item, such as these Parker House Rolls. While the sugar feeds the instant rise yeast, too much salt can actually kill it. So, we’re just using about ¾ teaspoon here. And it’s baby-bear-soup perfect.