Gather all ingredients and equipment you'll need.

Start by dissolving your yeast in the warm water. I also added just an additional pinch of sugar to mine to get it really going, but you don’t have to. Set it aside while you get everything else ready.

Combine the 4 1/2 cups flour and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt in a mixing bowl and stir to combine.

I know you see sugar in the list of dry ingredients too and it would make sense to add them now, but we’ll add it with the liquid ingredients so that it dissolves and gets really evenly distributed.

Melt your butter and warm your milk. I did this in the microwave by just adding the butter and the milk to a coffee mug and heating for 30 seconds at a time until both were warm but not boiling (remember, you want about 90 degrees which should feel warm to the touch, but not burn your finger).

Add in the egg to this mixture and stir until well combined. Then add sugar and stir until dissolved.

By now, your yeast should be looking a little foamy. If it's not, give it a little more time. If it never gets foamy, try again with new yeast preferably from a new package. Sometimes yeast can die during shipping to the grocery store and no matter what you do, it won't work. If we skipped the activation step (which many recipes do) we run the risk of wasting ingredients and time on bread that will never rise.

Add the milk mixture into your dough and pour the yeast mixture on top.

Stir to combine until a shaggy dough forms. It’s OK to have some dry spots, but you shouldn’t have a big pile of dry flour at the bottom of your bowl.

Don’t be afraid to get your hands in there and get the dough to stick together.

If you do have a ton of flour that isn’t incorporated (if your dough feels dry) add in 1 teaspoon of water at a time until it all comes together.

It was too crazy at home for me to film a video of myself kneading my bread dough, so here's a great video from King Arthur Flour about how to knead bread dough.

Spray your bowl and dough with pan spray and cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled in size.

At room temperature, this can take 1-2 hours, don't be tempted to rush it.

If you're in a hurry, you can cheat a little. I turned my oven on to preheat at 200 degrees for a minute or two and then turned it off completely and let my bread rise in the oven. It took about 30-40 minutes.

Portion your dough into equal pieces. Again, I am making half the recipe, so I portioned 6 rolls. If you made the full recipe, you’d be portioning 12 pieces.

If you plan to shape your rolls and separate them on a baking sheet, it's important to get the shape right now. If you're doing more of a tear apart roll (like the ones I pictured above) the shaping isn't quite as important.

You can spread these rolls out on a baking sheet or bake them in a muffin tin. There are a million ways to shape dinner rolls, but I like the pull apart kind, so I put mine in a baking dish where they have room to expand but are just touching.

Spray the tops with pan spray and lightly cover with plastic wrap and proof again until doubled.

This time cover lightly with plastic wrap, your rolls might expand higher than the sides of your dish and you don't want the plastic wrap smushing them down.

Be careful not to let them over-proof and collapse. They will rise a little bit more in the oven due to oven spring (the liquid will change to steam and cause one final rise)

If they do collapse, you’ll get one do-over. Just take all the dough out, reshape, and proof again. It’ll be a tiny bit denser, but it won’t be ruined.