Hamburger Buns

You can and should make adjustments and try variations on recipes you find.

They won't all come out right. They won't all come out as you expect.

You'll learn something and you'll become a better baker.

A friend tweeted that he didn't have all purpose flour so he was using whole wheat flour for the focaccia recipe. He said that this required a lot more water to get it to the consistency I described.

I was torn. Of course that's true. He and I both knew that whole wheat absorbs more water. If it had been me, I might have used less water than he had because whole wheat also doesn't have the strength that all purpose does. On the other hand, I'd added this much water because someone had told me that focaccia can tolerate a lot of water - up to the same weight as the flour. So this should work.

I would have made one adjustment and saw how it went. He made another adjustment. By the way, his came out great.

So that's what I was thinking over the weekend when I went to make hamburger buns. One of my favorite recipes (and I will stop using the word "recipes" in the next post) calls for dry milk and I don't have any.

Another of my favorites is this one for "Beautiful Burger Buns".

It's a great recipe and I'm not going to give my own today. You can just follow theirs.

But I made some adjustments.

I didn't feel like waiting til I had butter at room temperature so I used oil instead.

And I lost track of time during the rise so it rose way too much and had begun to collapse a bit (there is a lot of yeast in this recipe).

Also, I've never taken the time to brush them with butter and top them before baking. The result is much prettier than mine but if it's just me eating them I won't bother. Maybe for company.

They came out pretty good. We had hamburgers and the bun did all it was supposed to do and tasted exactly how it should.

It was a tad bit heavy. They weren't too dense but the texture was slightly wrong.

I've made them before with oil instead of butter so I knew that wasn't it. I probably should have paid more attention during the rise.

Anyway, starting in the next post we're going to make a very simple bread several different ways. We generally will use the same four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast - although we will also use the sourdough we've been growing along the way as well. The main differences will be how we treat the ingredients, the amount of water we use, and how we handle the dough.

I'm really looking forward to this.