For the past few years, I’ve been on a noble quest to find or create the best cinnamon roll recipe. I’ve tested and tweaked my methods to find the fluffiest bread, but I recently realized that I was starting in the wrong place: the bread isn’t the problem, it’s the filling. Conventional cinnamon roll recipes have a filling that leaks out before the roll is done baking. To make a better roll, you need to make a better, stickier cinnamon filling that doesn’t leak out of the roll. To do that, all you need to do is add starch.

My gold standard cinnamon roll is a Cinnabon, and I don’t care who knows it. They’re soft and sweet enough that they pose a moderate risk of spiking my blood sugar. But they’re worth it. While I don’t attempt to make a carbon copy of the roll at home, I do try to mimic the goo inside the Cinnabon, which is thick and takes up space in the roll. This can’t be achieved with the standard home recipe of butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon, and yet that’s the most common suggestion.

Cinnamon roll filling of these three ingredients looks good at first, but once it goes into the oven, it runs out and leaves a cinnamon stain. Adjust the ratio to add more butter, and what happens? It melts out again, but now the rolls are baking in butter and the sugar burns on the bottom. This combination will never work, because butter always melts before the bread is baked. This is where the starch comes in.

For goo that holds up, we need a substance that won’t melt at high temperatures and that can hold the crucial amounts of cinnamon and sugar suspended in it. The answer is starch. Its gelatinizing power is used to thicken and bind ingredients together in cooking and baking. The only catch: Most starches thicken when heat is applied, and because cinnamon rolls are standing upright, we can’t risk the filling oozing out as the dough rises. This is where you can use instant clear jel.