Easy Yeast Rolls Recipe

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These easy yeast rolls are made with simple ingredients and are perfect for yeast bread beginners. This recipe results in soft, pillowy rolls that can be made ahead of time and allowed to rest overnight in the refrigerator or baked right away.

If there’s one thing I want you to be able to make well as a home baker, it’s bread. Whether it’s sandwich bread, a fun anise-filled bread for a holiday, or a fancy babka, knowing how to make bread from scratch with yeast is very useful skill to acquire.

Why you’ll love this Easy Yeast Roll Recipe

While I have a bunch of yeast bread recipes on my site, these amazingly simple dinner rolls reign supreme when it comes to recipes I like to steer folks to when they’re intimidated by tackling their first yeast bread.

Since I haven’t always been a “yeast bread is NBD” kind of baker, I totally get that yeast bread is often scary to someone who has never done it before. But the more I do it, the more I realize how resilient and forgiving bread is.

And I’ve never actually truly ruined it.

Many years ago, I went to my parents’ house to learn how to make my grandmother’s Easter bread. I set aside a day to learn, and once my mom showed me the ropes, I said… “THAT’S IT?”

Yep, that’s it. I was so intimidated for seemingly no reason.

While I do agree it can seem like a lot of work up front and that working with yeast is finicky or hard to manage, I truly believe it’s much easier than most people assume it to be, and these homemade yeast rolls are one of the easier yeast bread recipes I’ve published on my site.

I do have to give a mega shoutout, first, to the blogger who inspired these and how that came about.

In 2019, I went to a blogging conference and, by happenstance, arranged a “blind date” roommate connection via a Facebook group.

Kristin (aka Baker Bettie) was looking for a roommate, and I was going solo, so we hooked up as roomies. Some might call us crazy, but it worked out in our favor and she and I clicked pretty easily right from the start.

I learned quickly that Kristin is the bread queen! She loves bread making, hosts bread baking workshops in her hometown, and has several bread baking series on her YouTube channel.

In fact, if you follow me on Insta, you might know that in January 2020, I started my own sourdough starter (it was as if my subconscious knew…).

My starter was under the direction of Kristin’s tutorial that I grew a beautiful starter, and her no-knead sourdough loaf has produced many amaaaazing loaves of sourdough bread in our house over the years.

Because of Kristin’s awesome direction, I decided to use her make ahead yeast rolls, because an easy yeast rolls recipe was something I had been itching to publish on FAF for a long time.

Her recipe was easy to follow and resulted in perfectly pillowy dinner rolls, even with my changing things around to fit my preferences when it comes to bread-making.

These easy yeast roll recipe is very straight-forward. You’ll get the dough together, allow it to rise, and then forming and shaping the rolls is actually very simple.

But let’s start with the basics.

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Easy Yeast Rolls Recipe Ingredients

While you’ll need yeast, of course, you’ll also need a few other ingredients.

We’ll use milk for a creamy, fatty base (I prefer whole) and granulated sugar to activate the yeast.

We’ll also use some melted unsalted butter, two eggs, some salt, and then all purpose flour.

That’s it! Only 7 ingredients, and another egg for an egg wash. I told you this was an easy recipe for yeast rolls.

How to make this Yeast Rolls Recipe

KNEAD THE DOUGH

HOW TO SHAPE DINNER ROLLS

STEP #6

After dough has risen, punch down the dough to deflate, then turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface.

Perfectly shaped soft dinner rolls, just like that!

Yeast Roll Recipe Tips

Once all of the rolls are in the pan, you have the option of allowing them to rise in the refrigerator to bake at a later time or at room temperature to bake after their second rise.

You can think of the fridge as a “pause” button any time you’re making bread. The active yeast will rest and pause its activity, and while it isn’t indefinite, you can leave these rolls in the fridge to rest for up to 18 hours.

Regardless of when you bake them, they’ll get a simple egg wash before they go into the oven, and once they’re done, they’re ready to eat!

This is a great dinner roll recipe for a day when you would rather just do the work the night before and bake your homemade dinner rolls right before, well, dinner.

Or a holiday where you can prep one more thing ahead of time to reduce the amount of work you have to do on the actual holiday.

How to serve these Easy Yeast Rolls

These easy yeast rolls are so versatile! You can spread them with butter, jam, jelly, or any of your other favorite spreads, or you can eat them plain or dipped into a bowl of soup. They also make a great slider or sandwich bread, so don’t limit yourself to how you can enjoy these rolls.

We love these homemade rolls spread with my cinnamon honey butter, but we also use them for sandwiches which are always extra good (because of the homemade bread love, of course).

The kids even allow them for PB&J, which is crazy, because they typically are pretty picky about the fancy whole grain bread that we usually get for them. Pshh… Bread snobs.

This is the perfect bread roll recipe for a quick and easy alternative to store-bought slider rolls or dinner rolls. We utilizing this recipe again and again all year long, especially in summer for burgers on the grill and as we host holidays in the later part of the year.

How to store these Easy Yeast Rolls for Beginners

Store leftover rolls covered tightly at room temperature up to 5 days. Rolls freeze well, up to 3 months. If you want to make these rolls ahead of time, see the notes section of the recipe card.

If you’re a yeast bread beginner or even a pro, this is definitely one to stick in your recipe collection as a go-to. I know you’ll love the taste and texture, and if yeast is plentiful in your kitchen right now, I say go for gold with these never fail yeast rolls!

Don’t miss my hot cross buns recipe, which is this same easy recipe with raisins and that signature flour cross on top.