What Makes Texas Roadhouse Bread Rolls So Good?

We all come to Texas Roadhouse for different reasons. Sometimes you crave a mouthwatering Texas Roadhouse steak. Sometimes you want to eat peanuts somewhere you can dump the shells on the floor. (You can't always throw peanut shells on the floor at Texas Roadhouse, but never give up.) Or, maybe you have a thing for line dancing. Hey, you do you, and we don't judge. But for many, the best part of this Texas-sized restaurant chain is those soft, pillowy bread rolls; A ticket to sweet, sticky heaven. What on Earth does this chain put in those things to get us hooked? Well, it's less a matter of what goes in the rolls and more about what goes on them: Namely, that decadent honey butter.

Texas Roadhouse uses a proprietary mix for the bread dough, which means we don't know for sure what's in it. But some copycat recipes have ventured a guess by enriching the dough with milk and adding some honey into the mix. Texas Roadhouse attributes its success to a made-from-scratch ethos, asserting that its rolls are baked every five minutes for maximum freshness. And, of course, there's the honey butter.

Dinner rolls typically serve as a part of the restaurant experience that might often get taken for granted — and it's easy to screw them up. You can make them too dense or too chewy; you can serve them at room temperature rather than pleasantly warm; and you can serve them with hard, waxy little pats of butter that shred your roll like tissue paper when you try to spread it. Credit to Texas Roadhouse, then, for getting it just about perfect with warm, fluffy rolls, served fresh, with a proprietary blend of honey, cinnamon, and butter.

Honey butter is an enticing proposition on its own. It's a sweet and savory flavor combination that rivals peanut butter and chocolate in sheer deliciousness. But like The Dude's rug in "The Big Lebowski," it's the cinnamon that ties it all together, turning what could have been an obligatory part of your Texas Roadhouse meal into an absolute highlight.