Beautiful Buns

I made buns again Saturday and here is how:

Place the following into bread machine:

1 cup milk

1/2 cup water

1 beaten egg

1/4 C butter (melted)

1 1/2 t. salt

2T sugar

4 cups bread flour

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

Into well, place 2 1/4t dry active yeast

Use dough cycle

Here it is after the bread machine has done it’s thing

When done, divide into 12 sections (I make 6 hot dog buns and 6 hamburger buns).  You can see my sections aren’t even, because I like the burger buns to be a little bigger and the hot dog buns to be a little smaller but you get the gist.

Resist the urge to make balls, the tops of the buns will come out smoother if you follow this technique instead. Pick up a section of dough and smooth it over the back of one hand, using your fingers to  push the dough flat over your knuckles.  Then take the edges and sort of tuck them under to the underside. So the top of the bun is now very smooth and stretched. Begin to shape the edges  with your thumb, until it is a perfect circle and once the edges are right then  you can pat it like when making a hamburger patty.

Unlike cookies, mistakes will show, they will not melt out into perfect circles. They also will not rise much bigger in diameter, so make them about the size you want to end up with. They will rise in height.

Place on greased cookie sheet and rise for 1 hour 15 minutes.

 

After rising  decide if you want to brush with egg whites for shine or spray with Pam or butter for golden color. I sprayed them with Pam. Bake at 400 for 12 minutes.

 


Oh I will just say too that you cut the buns to have a top and bottom, you don't bake a separate top and bottom. Maybe that is really obvious but it wasn't to me at first, yeah I'm kind of dim sometimes I know.

For hot dog buns I tried shaping them in two ways. One I just cut them into the basic shape I wanted (about 6 inches by 2 inches) and then blunted the ends by pushing them in a little.

The other way is to make a wider rectangle and then roll them up, pinching the ends under, this takes more work, I wanted to see if it is worth it.

Here is the tray ready to bake – the ones in the back are the rolled and folded and pinched ones, the ones in the front are just the rectangle ones.
 
The verdict – not worth all the rolling and pinching (for me) – what you get is the line down the edge, like where you would cut the bun open. Very authentic and gourmet and totally wasted on preschoolers in my opinion. See the line? It’s a girl! ;)

One touch I do think it nice to do, is let the buns bake with their edges touching – when you pull them apart you get that hot dog bun edge – see it?

 
And that’s it – more than you ever wanted to know about baking buns!