Burger Buns

yeast/flour/water/egg/butter/sugar/salt/oil/sesame seeds

Today, I made burger buns. I rolled dough into little balls, brushed their tops with eggs and milk (this is what gives them their shine), and dusted them with sesame seeds. I remember my thoughts when I randomly placed that bag of sesame seeds into my Carrefour shopping cart, “What the hell am I going to do with these? This is a really big bag.” In yo FACE, Shantai from two and a half weeks ago! Burger bunzzz!

As you can see, they’re all a bit different. No two are of the same size or shape. There’s the baby one, the fat uncle, the grandma with the snaggle tooth…. A happy family , half of which are currently being destroyed by the collective force of me and my partner’s digestive systems.

…

I kneaded dough for the first time.

I took this picture about five minutes in, and I then kneaded for six minutes more.

I put the kneaded dough into a large oily plastic mixing bowl, covered the bowl with plastic wrap, and let it sit near my furnace to keep the yeast warm and toasty. About an hour and 45 minutes later, when it doubled in size, it became so much fun to play with, this cool stretchy gracefully goopy mass. I felt like a kid again, and the only one home to see my excitement was Phoebe. This is Phoebe.

She was as ‘over it’ during my moments of excitement as she looks in this photograph. I love her.

Here are the balls of dough I rolled from the fun goop.

And here they are after resting under a towel for about an hour.

 

Things I learned today:

• What people call warm and tepid is actually quite hot to me, which explains last week’s series of yeast disappointments. Thank you, thermometer that I accidentally purchased online when I didn’t know what an oven thermometer looked like! You’ve come in handy, meat thermometer.
• Kneading is a lot of fun! You push and fold and turn and push and fold and turn. I love the way the dough feels underneath my hands, how it pushes back. It feels so interactive, and I’m reminded that the dough is alive (yeast). Also, it really is hard to overknead by hand because it sort of hurts to knead (hurts to need, omg I love it).
• Burger buns are super easy to make (recipe here).

 

I made burger buns today. 😀 Never in my life did I think this would be a thing for me to do. I always associated burger buns with bread aisles in grocery stores and picking off the stale bits when I got home. Not anymore! Fresh burger buns are now a thing in my life. I feel so free, so less dependent upon what my local supermarkets decide to provide. It’s a cool feeling.

Irish Soda Bread

425g pastry flour, weighed then sifted
1 3/4 tsp salt
1 1/8 tsp baking soda
510g buttermilk

(recipe taken from: Stella Parks’ Real Irish Soda Bread)

I love Irish soda bread. It looks like some rustic Game of Thrones type shit. And it tastes yummy and spongy, perfect for soaking up soups and sauces.

Before today, I didn’t have any way of knowing the temperature of my oven. All my eight or nine days prior of baking has been a lot of guesswork, random estimations, gut feelings, and intuition. I liked that. But, today, my oven thermometer arrived in the mail. I took it out of its wrapping and had absolutely no clue how to use it. Here are the things I did with it before looking to Google for help:

1. Pressed the thermometer against the glass of the oven door and wondered how it could stay there without the pressure of my hand.
2. Opened the oven door and tried to close it again, this time with the bottom of the oven thermometer in between. It did not fit.
3. Talked to myself and confused myself further.

Google was a great help. Here’s what Google said to me (and I paraphrase):

“Let the thermometer hang from the area of the rack where you typically bake shit.”

And that is what I did. I found that my oven is sort of batshit. Some background info on my oven:

• It has no temperature markers. It’s got off,  on,  and light me up.
• It does not close on its own. I use a long piece of thin rubber tubing tied to the door handle and to the stovetop rack to keep it closed, and it never fully closes.
• It takes a long ass time for my oven to heat up, and it loses about 15° C or so when I open and close the door.
• Still, it bakes shit. It baked all the following prior to my knowing that I was baking a lot of things at like 150°C, a bit too low for bread.

Anyways, this recipe calls for 232°C, something even after 2 hours (fuck the gas bill) my oven could reach only 200°C. I baked the bread anyway. 67 minutes. A bit too long, purposely as I was trying to compensate for the low temperature, but I don’t think I’ll do that again.

It came out a bit too brown in my opinion, though my partner thought it was bomb. I used pink himalayan salt which affected the coloring of the crumb, as you can see. I think I’m going to just make bread the way I like it, not just as the recipe states. It also spread more than I would have liked. Less buttermilk next time. Or maybe the quality of the buttermilk had an effect. No clue. More experimentation is required.

I miss relying on my intuition, the way the dough feels in my hand, that little timer in my mind that prompts me to check the oven or to turn the oven a bit stronger or lower in fire. I say I miss that as if I were a longtime baker, but still, that first week of discovery was amazing. It awoke something in me, something I didn’t even know was asleep, something I didn’t even know existed. And I love that. I love baking.