Baking bread ...
Third time's the charm. I've been playing with making our own buns and rolls, and yesterday's experiment was the Winner. These had enough flavor to be interesting, but not any one flavor element overwhelming the others or the stuff you eat it with. I have rye rolls for that already :)
These work very very well with soyburgers, regular burgers, and hot dogs.
Hamburger/Hotdog buns & dinner rolls
It's very simple, basically the default white-bread recipe with my three staple extra ingredients added:
450gms (basically around 1 pound) white bread flour (King Arthur)
8oz water (the stuff from our RO sink unit)
1 egg
+ about 1-2 more tablespoons water I had to add to adjust wet/dry proportions
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter
2 Tablespoons powered nonfat dry milk
2 Tablespoons sugar (yep, plain old white refined table sugar for once)
1.5 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons yeast
4 Tablespoons wheat bran
4 Tablespoons wheat germ
2 Tablespoons vital wheat gluten
Throw it all into the bread machine on "Dough" setting. Follow your machine's instructions or whatever works for you for additional kneading, shaping, proofing, baking. That's it.
What works for me is:
Take it out of the machine, put onto a very lightly floured surface, and do some rather light kneading. Mostly it just punches a few air pockets out, but I've noticed that the extra gluten has been doing a great job for giving me dough with a minimum of the big air pockets inside.
I shape it into a sorta thick roll, 2-3" in diameter and maybe 12-15" long. Then take a sharp bread knife (the serrated edge works much better on dough than the straight edge) and slice off slabs about 1/2-3/4" thick. It takes a bit of care to avoid stretching and warping the stuff, but as long as the result is mostly disk-shaped I'm happy. Sort of doughy sausage patties.
Lightly compress the disk (or leave it as-if if you want Tall Buns). Put on parchment paper on baking sheet and let it rise 60-90 minutes - I just eyeball it. Bake at 350 until light brown with the top starting to turn darker. It'll look not-very-done compared to a bread loaf done in the machine.
I've yet to get good enough with the shaping to not end up with a couple of weirdo pointy ends and mangled chunks. So I just roll those into thick strings and wrap them in a halfway-knot and get really cool-looking dinner rolls. I've played with braiding them, too, which makes a neat easy-to-pull-apart-into-chunks-for-dunking thing.
These work very very well with soyburgers, regular burgers, and hot dogs.
Hamburger/Hotdog buns & dinner rolls
It's very simple, basically the default white-bread recipe with my three staple extra ingredients added:
450gms (basically around 1 pound) white bread flour (King Arthur)
8oz water (the stuff from our RO sink unit)
1 egg
+ about 1-2 more tablespoons water I had to add to adjust wet/dry proportions
2 Tablespoons unsalted butter
2 Tablespoons powered nonfat dry milk
2 Tablespoons sugar (yep, plain old white refined table sugar for once)
1.5 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons yeast
4 Tablespoons wheat bran
4 Tablespoons wheat germ
2 Tablespoons vital wheat gluten
Throw it all into the bread machine on "Dough" setting. Follow your machine's instructions or whatever works for you for additional kneading, shaping, proofing, baking. That's it.
What works for me is:
Take it out of the machine, put onto a very lightly floured surface, and do some rather light kneading. Mostly it just punches a few air pockets out, but I've noticed that the extra gluten has been doing a great job for giving me dough with a minimum of the big air pockets inside.
I shape it into a sorta thick roll, 2-3" in diameter and maybe 12-15" long. Then take a sharp bread knife (the serrated edge works much better on dough than the straight edge) and slice off slabs about 1/2-3/4" thick. It takes a bit of care to avoid stretching and warping the stuff, but as long as the result is mostly disk-shaped I'm happy. Sort of doughy sausage patties.
Lightly compress the disk (or leave it as-if if you want Tall Buns). Put on parchment paper on baking sheet and let it rise 60-90 minutes - I just eyeball it. Bake at 350 until light brown with the top starting to turn darker. It'll look not-very-done compared to a bread loaf done in the machine.
I've yet to get good enough with the shaping to not end up with a couple of weirdo pointy ends and mangled chunks. So I just roll those into thick strings and wrap them in a halfway-knot and get really cool-looking dinner rolls. I've played with braiding them, too, which makes a neat easy-to-pull-apart-into-chunks-for-dunking thing.