Wednesday, July 07, 2021

third batch

And here's this morning's third batch of Joe Duff's recipe, modified yet again:

There wasn't much of a rise to the dough; maybe it was thanks to the 40-or-so grams of butter I added. But the dough rose enough for my tastes, and the burger buns came out looking flat, round, and not too bad. A closeup of a burger bun:

I added, along with black sesame, some garlic powder, onion powder, and oregano. This made my whole apartment smell wonderful when the baking got to the advanced stage. I did forget, however, to add the white sesame on top, despite having painted the buns' surfaces with mayonnaise. As you see below, though, the burger bun is pretty flat. That's kind of what I expected, and it's not far from what I'm looking for. If the dough is going to be heavy, then the bun ought to be thin.

The crumb inside looks decent. Taking out most of the fat really helped. The bun also felt strong enough to be able to handle a burger with the trimmings, so I think we've arrived—for now—at a decent burger-bun formula. I'm going to keep tweaking the recipe, though, because I'd really like something lighter and airier. This might mean going back to yeast. Maybe there's a way to do that without ending up with a rubbery mess like the Keto King's buns, which looked nice but didn't perform that well.

Conclusion: this bread is usable. It tastes good, it'll handle the strain of a hot dog or a hamburger, and while it looks a little weird, it's functional. Still not my new favorite bread, but for the moment, this will do.



3 comments:

Charles said...

Ah, this is a soda bread. OK, everything makes sense now. For some reason I thought that this was a yeast recipe. I think you had mentioned using yeast before, and I just assumed that this one used yeast as well. So it is really more of a cake after all.

And, yeah, ignore what I said about proofing. In fact, I would wonder how much that 30-minute rest negatively effects the rising power of the soda--as you know, you generally want to have as little time elapse between putting a soda dough together and baking as possible. I wonder if it would be possible to leave the baking powder out of the dry ingredients initially, only adding it after the husk and whatever have properly absorbed the liquid. But then you'd have the problem of incorporating the baking powder. Hmm.

Kevin Kim said...

Yeah, I'd mentioned the yeast in conjunction with the Keto King recipe, but Joe Duff's recipe has no yeast. I'm wondering what would happen if I switched out the baking powder for yeast plus a wee bit of honey and then allowed the dough to have two rises.

Charles said...

It's worth a shot.