Easy hamburger buns

I know, I know, I owe you yesterday’s recipes. Today I met one of my Facebook fans, who asked where they were. Seriously. She did make a rather unkind remark about my home town, which earned her a big black mark, but it was nice that she’d noticed there hadn’t been any new recipes since Sunday. Really.

So here’s my excuse. I didn’t manage it last night because Ninka was at mine until 20.00, and then I went to a FIFA 2014 tournament. It wasn’t easy. All I’ll say is, when a FIFA 2014 tournament on the PS3 ends in a session on SingStar, you know it’s been quite a night.

Yes, if you’ve read the recipe for toasted bread, you know what my musical abilities are and what I lack. It went something like this. I picked “Ain’t No Sunshine” (you can listen to it here) and about 30 seconds in my mate says, “Marcin, don’t sing the words, just sing the vowels…” I have to say, our wild streak kicked in at master level.

OK, enough about my social life. Time to get to work.

I’ll say it straight: buns, me? Never. No, never ever. Never, never, never. Honestly, it never even crossed my mind that one day I’d make my own buns. So I’d never, never, never, never made them. But shit happens, as they say 😉 And by some strange coincidence I had what looked like about 120 grams of minced beef. A hamburger without a bun is only half a hamburger, and the bun I used last time wasn’t exactly memorable, so I started looking.

You surely don’t imagine I came up with these buns myself. I mean, how to make them? How would I know? So yes, the recipe is stolen. I first found it on a site that had stolen it too but owned up, so here’s a link to the [fanfare] real, and fairly obvious, source. Actually, all I’ll be stealing is the ingredient list, and even that only up to a point. Because this is a bit rich: “Don’t add too much extra flour (I used 2 and 1/4 cups in all).” Ta-ra-ra. Show-off. With that amount of flour there was no way the dough was going to be “elastic and not sticky”. Elastic it certainly was, so elastic I grew webs between my fingers. I’ll give you the right amount of flour in the ingredients.

I’ll just add that I thought buying powdered milk in Warsaw would be a breeze. Wrong. I only found it in shop number 5 (in words: the fifth). A disaster. In one shop they said they used to carry it but it kept “dating out”, so they didn’t any more. Hmm… dating out. And there I was thinking the whole nation ate buns for breakfast every morning. Made from powder 😉

I’d hoped to make these buns with Ninka, but her mum had something to sort out with her, so by the time I picked her up they were already done. Still, she appreciated them and ate one, not in a hamburger like me but for supper, and said they were OK. A culinary compliment from my daughter is a great honour.

At a glance:

Prep time: 15 minutes

Rising time: 2 hours in all

Baking time: 15 minutes

Oven temperature: 200 degrees Celsius

Serves: I got 8 buns. How many people 8 buns will feed is for you to decide

How many calories? White wheat bread has a [insert swear word here] load of calories

Ingredients for hamburger buns:

• a little more than half a cup of water
• 3 cups of wheat flour 
• 2 hen’s eggs
• 3 large spoonfuls of powdered milk (and one small spoonful more, as explained below)
• 50 grams of butter
• 1.5 tablespoons of sugar
• a level teaspoon of salt
• a teaspoon of instant yeast (I love instant yeast. All respect to whoever invented it)
• sesame seeds to sprinkle on top (if you like them. I made some with and some without)

The recipe (we’ll be kneading):

All right, I’m copying from my source a bit, but there’s no other way to do this. First I melted the butter and set it aside to cool a little. Once it was no longer hot, I poured it into a bowl of warm water (that little bit more than half a cup) and added the sugar and powdered milk. I stirred and added the yeast.

Then I spent 10 minutes working at the computer. After that I added an egg, tipped in half the flour (a mistake: you need to add nearly all of it straight away) and added the salt. I mixed everything with a big spoon (I always start kneading dough by giving it a good stir with a spoon), and once I thought it wasn’t desperately sticky any more, I started kneading by hand. That’s where the flour mistake came back to bite me. Unfortunately the bag of flour was shut away in the cupboard, so the door, the bag, the whole lot ended up covered in dough 🙁 Dear Dorota, why did you do this to me?

I did manage to pick myself up after that little setback. I never give up halfway. I added the right amount of flour and kneaded it into a rather lovely dough. Back into the bowl it went, covered with a tea towel (did you know my tea towel is exactly like the background on my Facebook fan page? A classic), then into the oven to rise (the oven was my most important piece of kitchen “furniture”, so I took ages choosing one, and among its many fine features is a lovely “dough proving” setting). After an hour, once the dough had risen a bit, I took it out and divided it into 2, then those 2 into 4 and those 4 into 8 pieces. Lost you? You want 8 buns.

I flattened them by hand, as Dorota instructs, and put them on two trays lined with baking paper. Then back into my magic oven to rise (yeast likes it dark and cosy. In my oven the proving setting is about 40 degrees Celsius), this time for 50 minutes.

With 3 minutes of rising time left, I made a wash with the yolk of the second egg and a tablespoon of milk (which I made with hot water and a teaspoon of my powdered milk, because I didn’t have any other milk). I brushed the risen buns with the wash and sprinkled some with sesame seeds. I heated the oven to 200 degrees Celsius and baked the buns for exactly 15 minutes. In two batches. They turned out just fine. And they’re great for burgers. Enjoy!