Monday, May 21, 2012

buns!

HA! I bet you thought you were going to see one of the girls' adorably cute bottom in the bath or something.  Sorry, not those kind of buns!

America is the only place you can buy decent hamburger buns.  In Manila we spent three years complaining about the tiny sweet flimsy hamburger buns we could buy there.  You can't even buy anything close to a burger bun in Ethiopia.

So I made some last night.  We ordered a ton of beef and chicken patties from Kenya in the last meat order through the embassy.  ("Meat order" kind of tickles my funny bone-HA!) Anyway, we had all these patties and no buns and I figured I could make some pretty decent hamburger buns as long as I found a recipe.

I was right.  Homemade hamburger buns are way better than the store bought kind in the U.S. I'm not sure why I never thought about making them while in Manila.  It was super easy and they were extremely tasty.  I highly recommend continuing to buy buns in the States because, well it's a million times easier to grab a bag of buns at Safeway. I'm not going to begin to pretend that I would make homemade burger buns if I were living in America.  Just like I wouldn't be making homemade bagels, tomato sauce, and chicken broth.  If I were in America I'd be buying these things.  No doubt.

But I'm not living in America and some things are done out of necessity.  So if you are overseas like us or you just want to impress whoever you are cooking cheeseburgers for, make your buns.  They are way yummy!

So this is the recipe I started with.  I made some changes because I hate tough rolls.  Bread making is about not adding too much flour and not over kneading.

I warmed the liquids, butter, sugar and salt in a microwave bowl and let it cool to lukewarm.  In my KitchenAide mixer (with dough hook attachment) I put 3 cups of flour and the instant try yeast (2 1/4 tsps is how much is in one packet).  I added the liquid mixture to the dry and slowly mixed it together.  I then added the flour cup by cup until the dough  was no longer pooling at the bottom and had completely pulled away from the sides of the bowl.  I think in the end it was a total of 4 1/2 cups of flour (not the 51/2 cups of flour the recipe calls for).  Basically the dough had all adhered to the hook and was spinning around attached to it.  I then let the dough mix slowly on the dough hook for a few minutes (maybe 3 minutes not 8).  I then followed the recipe and let the dough rest for about and hour until it had risen and doubled it's original size.  Cut into twelve pieces and formed them into round bun shaped balls and let it rise again.  Egg washed them and baked the buns at 400 degrees for about 11 minutes.  They were fluffy and tender and moist.



2 comments:

Just US said...

Those look really good! I am going to have to give them a try the next time we order meat.

Heather P. said...

Haha, yes I was expecting to see some tushies -:). Your food pictures look delicious, and I'm sure the food tastes great! The things we take for granted with our grocery store in the US...