Making Whole Wheat Hamburger Buns

Amy’s dad gave us some venison that I’ve been wanting to put to use. I thought I’d make myself a venison burger for lunch a few days ago but didn’t really fancy it on Wheat or Italian bread. Our new KitchenAid mixer has us looking for every opportunity to put it to use so I looked up a recipe for home-made hamburger buns. My simple lunch turned into a very large dinner hours later.

We generally eat whole wheat bread much more often than white bread, so I altered the recipe and used mostly whole wheat flour. I thought I’d write a little more about this experience instead of just posting my results as working with whole wheat has been a little difficult and I’d like to share what has worked for us.

Lets get started.

Ingredients

1 cup milk
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup unsalted butter
1 egg, room temperature
1 tablespoons honey
4 1/2 cups flour (unbleached, whole wheat, or a mix)
1 package instant yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Wet Ingredients

We start by putting our wet ingredients (milk, water, butter, and honey) into a small sauce pan and heating over low heat to help melt the butter. Keep the temperature pretty low, as we don’t want to scorch the milk. Once the butter starts to soften I use a wooden spoon to break it up into about 1/4 inch slices so it melts a little quicker.

Once the butter has melted let the liquids cool for awhile (the recipe suggests 120°F) and then mix in the one egg. We want to make sure the mix is cool enough that we don’t start cooking the egg.

Dry Ingredients

Next we mix all of our dry ingredients together (Flour, salt, and yeast). This is assuming that you are using Instant Yeast as well. I much prefer this over Active Dry Yeast as one doesn’t have to bloom the yeast before starting. We can just mix it into our dry ingredients and move on. If you are using active dry yeast, or compressed dry yeast, you’ll want to alter this procedure based on your yeast instructions.

For this recipe I started with 3 cups, or 360 grams, of whole wheat flour.

After a long struggle to get perfect chocolate chip cookies I turned to weighing out my flour instead of using the ‘scoop and scrape method’. There are several factors that can affect the actual volume of the flour in a measureing cup; from the manner it was added to the vessel, the length of time it has set on the shelf and compacted, and even humidity can play a role. I’ve heard several suggestions for getting consistent flour measurements; from shaking the flour container up and down, to spooning the flour out into the measureing cup. These work sometimes, and other times they don’t. For me, the most consistent way to get an accurate measurement is to weigh the flour on a kitchen scale.

So, we combine the flour, yeast, and salt and give them a little stir to make sure they are distributed. The next step is to add the wet ingredients. I just poured the wets on top of the dry in the mixing bowl. I find that putting the wets on top helps keep the flour dust down.

Once the flour is saturated and starts to look like a batter we add some additional All Purpose (AP) flour in 1/2 cup increments until the dough starts pulling away from the sides of the bowl.

We don’t really want to add very much AP flour beyond this point. It seems that wheat flour dough tends to be more sticky at this point than white flour doughs and it’s tempting to add more flour in an attempt to keep our hands clean in the proceeding steps. I find that it is better to leave the dough sticky, and use a bit of flour on my hands to keep the dough from sticking.

Kneading

Once the dough has pulled away and forms a ball we turn off the mixer and let the dough rest for about ten minutes. The rest allows the flour to really soak up all the moisture and get a good start on forming the gluten. This is a fairly recent addition to my bread making routine, and I think that the results are a bit better in the end.

After ten minutes we kick the mixer to speed two and let it knead for 10-15 minutes. Check the dough by pinching off a small amount and forming it into a ball. Flatten the ball out and start stretching it as you might with a pizza dough, forming a circle, pulling the edges out while rotating.

We are looking for the dough to form a thin membrane without breaking. If held up to a window or light you should be able to almost see through it. Hold a finger up behind and see if you can see the shadow through the dough clearly. If the dough starts to tear, throw it back in the mixer or hand knead for another five to ten minutes.

Rising

Once the dough has reached the desired development we’ll put it in a bowl with about 1/2 a tablespoon of olive oil. Turn the dough to coat it in the oil and then cover the bowl with a tea towel. Put it in a nice warm place for about an hour. I normally stick it in the cold oven with just the light on.

For this recipe I tried something new that I had read about just recently. One of the problems I’ve run into when making wheat bread is that it turns out very dense. I’d read that it is more difficult for the gluten to form in the wheat and that it can be beneficial to allow for two rises before forming. So this is just what I did for these buns. I allowed the dough ball to double in size, then punched it out and gave it a quick two minute knead by hand, and then put it back in the bowl to double again.

Forming

After the second doubling we punch down the dough again and give it another two minute knead by hand to redistribute the yeast. We then form a rough rectangle and cut the dough into 12-16 pieces.

Take each piece and knead it a couple of times and form it into a ball. If you find that some are larger than others you can pinch off a bit of the dough and add it to the other. You really can’t harm the dough at this point.

We then sprinkle a little corn meal on a baking sheet and place the dough balls, leaving at least an inch between each. Flatten the balls a little bit to form more of a bun shape, then brush with a little water or an egg wash and sprinkle with sesame seeds if desired.

Cover the buns with a tea towel again and place in a warm place to rise again for about 35 minutes or so. This is an ideal time to preheat the oven to 400°.

Baking

After the 35 minutes are up pop the buns into the oven for 10-12 minutes. Keep a close eye on them as they seem to go along for a bit and then brown fairly quickly.

Pull the buns out of the oven and place them on a cooling rack to cool for about 20-30 minutes before slicing.

My meal consisted of two venison burgers; one with ketchup, mustard, and home-made sweet pickles, the other with lettuce, red onion, and home-made BBQ sauce for dipping. On the side I had steamed broccoli and carrots, some Brussels’s sprouts sauteed with bacon , and a home-made dill pickle.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.