This is a pan specific to hot dog buns that I imagine can be used equally well for dinner rolls. The pan is vaguely sectioned by shallow ridges into ten compartments. Sort of. The bottom of the pan is apparently waved. The pan is made of heavy-gauge steel and coated on the inside with some kind of non-stick surfacing, but I do not trust that. Judging by the product photo, I somehow gained the impression that each compartment would be deeper and better defined so I was disappointed when I opened the box and saw there was little difference between this pan and a regular brownie pan, which in my opinion works as well.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha, breathe. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah, gasp. Hahahahahaha, choke. Hahahahaha.
OMG, that kills me.
I figured three ounces of dough per compartment. Just a guess. That would be thirty ounces total dough, by weight. MATHS!
| Hot dog bun dough The dough is not shown because I have already shown that dozens of times and because it's a little bit boring. It is dough. Ah'ight? I figure, go ahead and make extra dough. Either throw away the surplus or make rolls with it, but do not come up short. That would be tragic and unacceptable. I do not comport with so-called baker's percentages. Baker's percentages is a contrivance for bakeries that produce batches in bulk. What is useful for the home baker to know is how much water by cup to start out with for the desired result and approximately how much flour by cup that water will take. The exact amount of flour even by weight is NEVER usefully stated due to atmospheric and climatic circumstances and by the nature of the liquids being used and by the variations in weight of other extraneous materials going into the dough. Recipes always ALWAYS ALWAYS leave room to fudge the amount of flour by at least 1/2 cup, often more. So why bother being exact about it? Come on. After all their prescriptions on careful measurement, the weight of sifted flour VS the weight of unsifted flour, the weight of a cup of flour in an arid environment compared the the weight of a cup of flour in a humid environment, how to properly scoop a cup, how to level it, the recipes then inevitably say, "use more flower if needed." The point is, the home baker must develop a feel for the dough, a sense of slack VS stiff, sticky VS dry, elastic VS resistant, alive VS barely active or dead. Online recipes for hotdog buns that I've read all specify milk, eggs, and often butter. Reading them I was left thinking throughout, "Bread dough fortified like this is a recipe for brioche." FACT! Is this what people want, brioche for hot dog buns? Seems to me that brioche would be too dense a crumb for hotdogs or for sausage sandwiches, although it does make excellent bread. Sure enough, comments to the recipes report that faithfully following the recipe as given resulted in buns that were too dense, didn't rise sufficiently to suite them, were too crusty, too heavy, etc. Faithful recipe followers were all basically complaining about having brioche instead of Wonder bread type buns of the sort they were expecting, which positively amazes me considering it is all right there in black and white at the onset. I feel another laughing fit coming on. Focus! These buns will have olive oil for extraneous material and that's it. The dough will also start in advance with a poolish, a portion of the total amount of dough that is pre-fermented and is started with commercial yeast, and made to be wet rather than stiff. This will have several advantages. It gives the bread more character. It makes the bread taste better. It makes the bread last longer. It uses less yeast. It incorporates yeast death into the dough (← I made that one up, but it is how the picture looks inside my head ). It conditions the dough. It increases the enzymatic activity. It makes the dough easier to work. It makes the dough more extendible. It takes less than a minute to prepare even if you are a spaz such as myself. It imparts a lovely odor that tells you that you are on the right track and encourages you to persist. Convinced? I guess the total amount of dough to be 1 + 1/2 cup water, 5 to 6 level cups flour weighing 4 oz. each. It is just a guess, I could be wrong. Restated, that is 12 oz water total, 20 to 24 oz. flour total 32 oz. to 34 oz. totally total water plus flour, and that is an estimated 2 oz. to 4 oz. above my guess that each compartment of the pan will take 3 oz. of dough. Ta daaaaaa MATHS! Poolish: Started in the wee hours of the morning. 1/2 cup water plus 1 cup flour plus 1/4 teaspoon commercial yeast (that is all the yeast that this dough is having. From hereon the dough is on its own. ), mix it all up. Bang! Done. Mind, the amount is arbitrary and not scientific. It is also 50% water / 50% flour by weight, so very loose and wet, not quite dough. Here, the poolish is 1/3 the total amount of water but less than 1/3 the total amount of flour, it could just as easily have been half the amount of total water and half the amount of flour. The decisions here were impulse. [In baker's percentages, just for exercise, the amount of flour is always 100% and everything else is related to that. So one cup flour = 4 oz. + 1/2 cup water = 4 oz., so by the unique MATHS of baker's percentages, water is 100% to flour, which is very wet sponge indeed.] <--- I do not like that system. It runs counter to all that is holy, mathematically, and one time Sir Isaac Newton and Archimedes, they're buds you know, appeared to me in a dream and said to me, "Hahaha, you loon, that's bollox! Stop doing that." Then they laughed like arrogant ass holes and made me feel stupid. And then I woke up. And then I thought, "Hmm, they do make a point there." Go to bed. Wake up. Ignore the poolish. Take a shower. Have breakfast. Goof around. Play with dog. Watch TV. Fly a kite tied to the back of my bike. Put air in tires. Give two dollars to a panhandler. Do a crossword. Empty dishwasher. Read favorite blogs. Leave mocking and antagonistic comments. Check poolish. Oh my, that is beautiful. The smell intrigues me. It is fresh and ever so slightly sour at the same time, It captures me and holds my attention. It mesmerizes me. Hold me, for I am in a swoon. Twelve hours or so after starting the poolish it will now become proper dough. I decide NOT to add additional yeast, which is the customary thing to do, and instead relied on the yeast already active in the poolish portion to do all the work for the remaining 2/3 water and all the remaining flour that comprises the total amount of dough. The active yeast in the poolish will inoculate the remaining dough and take off from there in a wild undisciplined orgy of sexual and asexual reproduction taking advantage of the sudden influx of fresh food and new raw material. This will take a little longer than refreshing with additional yeast in quantity usually 4X as much as the poolish was started, but, la la la, I don't care. 1 cup warm water was added to the poolish and mixed. Flour was added by the cup, its effect observed with each addition. The final additions added by the 1/2 cupful. * Added 1 teaspoon kosher salt which is flakier and so more voluminous than table salt. If I was using table salt, then I'd use less. If I was using sea salt, I would then judge its saltiness and factor in its mineral content, by taste, and its grind, fine or coarse. * Added 3 tablespoons all purpose virgin olive oil. This is the sole extraneous material that differentiates this dough from a plain baguette type of dough. It does not match the sites I've read online that describe more fortified brioche type doughs. This poolish and new water (straight from the tap) which totaled 1 +1/2 cups (12 oz.) took 5 + 1/2 cups flour (22 oz. ) in order to stiffen sufficiently to enable it to be lifted from the bowl and stretched into a snake shape. Stretch and fold, stretch and fold, over and over and over, all the while judging its increasing elasticity, not allowing it to break, sensing it soften under hand, feeling it become more cooperative, more adept at adhering to itself but not to my hands. It is a thing of real beauty and a source of unending fascination, soft as a baby's bum, although I never actual touched a baby's bum. It's a phrase, okay? The dough is set on the work surface and brought together into a single blob as if that would be one big boule. It is placed back into the same bowl that grew the poolish, and I'm off to other non-bread related activities for awhile. This will be its first rise (its second if you count the poolish) and I will not be too concerned about it. I will return to divide it out before it doubles. That is the story of the birth of the dough. The rest is told in pictures. |
The work surface is long. Underneath the work surface are two drawers. The divider between the drawers gives me a nice 1/2 way marker without having to measure anything. It doesn't matter how many inches it is. What matters is the dough snake is divided in half, and each half then divided into fifths to fill the ten compartments in the baking pan. That's where judgement comes in. For the sake of SCIENCES, I am double checking with a trusty kitchen scale, but honestly, it is not necessary. The divided pan itself is a perfectly serviceable measuring device. I'm just trying to gain a handle for all future dough batches, and all that redounds to how much water to start with.
The segments are held under a dampened kitchen towel as each segment is treated as a separate loaf of bread. Each segment is stretched mostly in the direction that it is inclined to stretch having been a snake, then folded in thirds, then stretched again, folded again, this time in the direction that it is disinclined to stretch due to it having been a snake. It puts up a bit of resistance, but this folding and changing direction redistributes the yeast cells and crosses the direction of the long molecules of the protein network developed by stretching.
Each 3 oz. dough segment is stretched and folded, rotated, stretched mostly in the opposite direction, then folded again. Now there is a tiny dough pillow with loose ends that must be pinched and tidied.
The tiny dough pillow is stretched one last time into a short snake shape in order to accommodate a hot dog or a sausage. It resists stretching because its gluten protein network is crossed and not all lined up like before when it was a long snake. Had the snake just been chopped into ten pieces, then the internal structure would all be in alignment and much looser with a tendency to flatten and result in gigantic air bubbles forming and finally with a much less reliable supportive structure. That is how baguettes and batons are fashioned, by pulling -- worked and stretched as a snake and then left like that. These keep snapping back to a pillow shape after they are stretched to a hot dog shape, which is good, they must be stretched and re-stretched possibly a few times until at last they fully relax and behave.
I see now that 3 oz. each is too much dough for this pan. Each little bun is circumcised as it were, so that they do not fill the pan with exceedingly tall buns all grown together.
Still too big. They are trimmed again. That means 3 oz. is too much per compartment for this pan, and that means the total amount of dough must be reduced next time if I should aim for an exact amount.
Painted with butter, especially between segments. The dough will rise together and tend to join. this butter will help keep the buns separate.
I return to the dough before it is fully risen. I want it in the oven before it peaks to maximum rise. It will go into the oven a little on the young side. Surprise! You're baked. The risen buns are re-buttered concentrating on the cracks between them in order to help keep the rolls separated since the pan divisions are so shallow as to be nearly nonexistent.
There was 8 oz. extra dough. This was divided into four 2oz. sections, stretched, and heavily buttered, then rolled up and put into a muffin pan. They are wonderful. All olive oily and buttery. These hot dog buns and the four rolls are extraordinary. You will never get anything this good at the grocery. Not even the bakery at the grocery store. They got nuthin', and I mean nuthin' over these. No brag, just FACT.
Conclusion: The same thing happened with this pan that happened with the square steel brownie pan. The buns grew together then rose up taller than they are wide. I don't like that. It results in an East-coast hotdog bun that one slices down the center through the top crust rather than laterally like a normal hot dog bun. This means I must, and you must if you use this pan, put less dough per compartment than shown here. That is probably 2 oz. to 2 + 1/4 oz. dough per compartment. That way they will be just as wide but not as tall. Although if you are aiming for dinner rolls then this is perfect.
Meats braised in shallow oiled water, covered at first and then opened to expedite evaporation, and then sizzled in the oil that remained to put a singe on them and crisp them up a little.
Meats braised in shallow oiled water, covered at first and then opened to expedite evaporation, and then sizzled in the oil that remained to put a singe on them and crisp them up a little.
For the hot dog I didn't have sauerkraut so I soaked thinly sliced bok choy in rice vinegar and sugar. It is quite good, better than sauerkraut, in fact.
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