“Nothing better than butter” could be Amidah Saleem’s motto.
“My mom said I used to sit in the corner and eat butter,” says Saleem. “I literally would take butter out of the refrigerator and go hide.”
Saleem no longer hides in the corner; she uses butter — about 12 pounds a month — to make butter rolls in her business, Now That’s a ButterRoll.
“My mom has been making these butter rolls before I was born,” Saleem says. “And I took her recipe and tweaked it a little bit and made it my own. I started making them professionally 10 years ago, but I’ve been making them since I was 12 years old.”
Her mother made butter rolls from a family recipe on holidays, Saleem says.
Hoping Saleem would spend some time in the kitchen, her mother said, “Cooking brings you peace. Cooking allows you to focus and re-evaluate the day. Such a peace will come over you.”
But Saleem, who describes herself as “such a tomboy growing up,” preferred playing outside. “I grew up with four brothers.”
Making her own butter rolls at 12 years old was a fluke. “My mom was at work, and I couldn’t go outside.” Saleem decided to make a butter roll, but she didn’t want to strictly use her mother’s recipe, which includes nutmeg, sugar, and butter. She said, “Okay, I’m going to do it a little dicier. I love it, but let’s try something new.”
She added a secret ingredient, which she still uses to this day. And her mother’s words about cooking rang true. “It allowed me to put some passion and love and care into what I was doing. It kind of calmed me down and gave me such a peace. Just rolling and kneading the dough.”
Her mom’s friend tried Saleem’s first butter roll effort and said, “Now, that’s a butter roll.” Saleem didn’t make another until 12 years later when she was five months pregnant with her first child, Anthony Jordan Jr. She craved butter rolls, so she called her mother at 3 a.m. and asked her to make one for her. “My mom would not make it. She said, ‘You are grown up. You are married. It’s time for you to do your own cooking.’”
Saleem immediately went to Kroger, got all the ingredients, and came home and made her butter roll. “It took me about two hours to get back home and fix everything. It quenched a thirst like the best taste ever.”
Butter rolls became her thing. “I would make them for holidays. That would be my dish. I would bring it and everybody loved it.”
Her butter roll is the perfect comfort food, she says. “It’s one of those desserts where you just curl up on a couch with it on a cool night — it’s so warm and buttery — and just watch a good movie.”
She began selling them in 2015. “I got tired of people saying, ‘Can you make me one?’ I said, ‘I need to make some money off of this.’”
In 2020, Saleem got a business license and gave out samples and her business card to friends, family, and church members. She posted photos on social media. “People would text me. I would do videos where people were eating them, so I could get reviews. The more I posted, the more people purchased them.”
Her pastor, Tara Crawford, let her use the church kitchen to bake. “I started [making] maybe 10 or 15 a week. And now I do 15 or 20 a day.” She also makes caramel cakes based on her mother’s recipe, and she later added baked potatoes stuffed with steak, chicken, shrimp, her homemade Alfredo sauce — and lots of butter. Her website is nowthatsabutterroll.com.
Saleem, who people now call “Miss Butter Roll,” does all the work herself. “I get up at 5:30 every morning. The first thing I do is pray and give God all the glory. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be able to provide for my children.”
Then, she says, “I go straight to the church and get to rolling and cooking.”