Homemade Hamburger Buns

Anyway, I checked out several of my favorite whole grain baking books.

• Laurel’s Bread Book – the must have for anyone baking whole grain!
• Whole Grain Baking – from King Arthur’s Flour. Lots of good stuff in here.
• The Bread Beckers’ Recipe Collection – invaluable!

Both Laurel and Whole Grain Baking call for potato flakes, which I don’t have here. I put it on my grocery list because I’m intrigued to see what that will add to the buns. The Bread Beckers just suggest you use your basic dough recipe to make the dough in your bread machine. Set to basic dough setting, which in my Zojirushi is an hour and 50 minutes. Then remove, cut into 12 equal pieces, roll into ball, flatten, pop on baking sheet and let rise about 45 minutes. It seemed easy enough, and since I definitely had my basic bread ingredients at hand, I reasoned that at least I knew that the amounts and types of ingredients used in my recipe did, at least most of the time, turn out what appears to be an actual loaf of bread. I thought maybe it would be best to start with what was already known! So I did just that.

Turned out the dough balls,

let them rise, and baked at 350 for about 15 minutes.

They didn’t turn out half bad.

Some things I learned.

• they spread as well as rise, so some of them look more like Pita flat breads than a hamburger bun
• The texture is different from the bread machine baked bread, it is a little chewier, and the rise is better, so the bread has an altogether different (in a better way) taste. Even the flatter buns still rose, they just spread out. So the bread on the inside was still light and airy.
• A little organic Canola oil spray on the bottom of the pan really helped them brown up on the bottom and they popped right off.
• They have made great morning muffins. We ate them with butter and strawberry jam for breakfast and they were quite yummy! Their size makes them perfect for sandwiches as well!

I can see that this basic recipe would work for muffins, or dinner rolls as well. I do think after this experience that a hamburger bun pan would be helpful, especially since I will be baking these a lot! So far, the only thing I’ve found is this pan from King Arthur’s Flour – it does seem nice. I want to look around a bit more though, and I’ll probably try my hand at these a few more times too. I’m also excited to see the hot dog pan at King Arthur’s Flour. This would be a necessity if you were trying to make a hot dog bun, and I’m very interested in this as well.

I couldn’t resist a picture of the final product – my dinner! We had organic, pasture fed pork patties on my homemade buns with our homegrown lettuce. I made a sweet potato bake from last year’s sweet potatoes – it was really yummy and Rob even went back for seconds ( a miracle considering he doesn’t like sweet potatoes.) And, of course, the obligatory green vegetable representative, a salad! It looked so spectacular and colorful on the plate, and so much of it was homegrown or homemade (well, all of it really except the piggie grew up about 30 miles down the road,) I simply had to gush!