Since I am trying to make all our bread now, I have to practice! Sometimes I’ve been successful and sometimes not. I also want to talk a little about how my sourdough starter has been doing!
We tried making homemade hot dog buns last week. They tasted good but they turned out flat. I think I know why though. I didn’t add enough flour to the dough. I’ve noticed that most of the time I have to add a lot more flour than is called for in the recipe to get to the texture that it is supposed to be. Maybe I am not measuring my flour properly. The dough for the hot dog buns ended up so sticky that it was impossible to work with. At least now we know what to do for next time!
On Saturday, we had homemade pizza. I doubled the recipe and still didn’t feel like it was enough crust. I think I might have messed up on my timing with this though. The dough needed to rest and rise longer in the pan. I did use my sourdough starter as most of the raising agent so that probably contributed to the longer rising time. The pizza was good though and had a great crust because yesterday we ate up the rest of it (and I guess it was enough crust!)
One bad thing about making bread in the afternoon to be used as part of dinner: Dinner ends up being late! We usually eat around 5 PM, but because of my bad timing, we have been eating around 6 to 6:30 PM lately.
I also made crackers again with my sourdough starter last week and of course, the crackers were all gone by the end of the day. My kids seemed to be addicted to them. I do need to figure out how to roll the dough out thinner though. The middle ends up too thick and doesn’t get crispy when baked. I am considering splitting the dough in half and rolling out smaller portions to get the thinner dough.
So my sourdough starter is still alive and happy. I have it out on the counter right now so I can feed it before I go to bed. We also went out to a warehouse grocery store after Josh got home from work today and I needed the fridge space! So out came the starter to sit on the counter overnight.
Yesterday, dinner was late again because I was making hamburger buns from scratch. I think if I had started the dough around 1 PM like I had been planning that I would have been okay, but no, I was a little bit scared of making burger buns from scratch and was actually trying to think of something else to make for dinner! In the end, I started my dough around 2 to 3 PM. I will say that making hamburger buns from scratch isn’t easy! I used a recipe from one of my newer cookbooks, Brown Eggs and Jam Jars: Buttermilk Oat Hamburger Buns. It uses some good for you ingredients: old-fashioned oats, whole wheat flour, honey. I think there were 3 times that I had to let it sit for around a total of 2 hours and 15 minutes of resting/proofing.
You can check out Brown Eggs and Jam Jars at Amazon at this link, or just click the following image of the book.
I know these buns must have tasted good because my youngest boy ate one without a burger in it, and my oldest boy asked if he could have another bun (no burger) after he had finished his first burger.
-Lynn