Over the past several years I've gotten better at making breads of all sort but there's one sort of bread that I haven't been so wonderful at making and that's the hot dog bun. It's not the bread per se that's the problem really; it's the reliable shaping of the bread into a good form for a bun. It seems simple enough to roll out the dough into a cylinder and then bake it but it seems like I'm always getting one of two results: either I don't roll it out thin enough and the dough spreads out into a flattened shape, or (in trying to avoid this) I roll it out too thin and get something too skinny to hold a sausage well.
For this batch, however, I borrowed a trick from an online recipe. Instead of rolling out cylinders of dough and then spacing them out on a cookie sheet, why not lay them next to each other so that when they rise and then bake they grow together, like a tray of brown-and-serve rolls? Packing them close will keep them from flattening out too much and they'll pull apart easily enough when they're done. And, as you can see from the photos, that's just what happened. I'm pretty pleased with the results even though I was in a rush toward the end and could have done better at rolling them out evenly before baking.
As usual the recipe is a modification of an online recipe that looked promising, in this case Adam Gertler's "Rye Split Top Hot Dog Buns", but with a simplified procedure, more rye, and a magic ingredient that I have found makes my home baking far more reliable.
Ingredients
¾ cup whole milk (cold is OK)
3 tablespoons butter (again, cold is OK)
3 tablespoons honey
½ a medium-sized yellow onion
1 packet (¼ oz.) active dry yeast
¾ warm tap water
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 tablespoon whole caraway seeds
⅓ cup gluten flour
1½ cups whole-grain rye flour
about 2 cups all-purpose white flour
cooking oil (generally I use either canola or soybean oil)
corn meal
Directions
In the mixing bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a bread hook place the milk, the butter, and the honey. Chop the ½ onion finely while heating a teaspoon or two of vegetable oil on medium-low in a small frying pan. Cook the chopped onion for about five minutes until it is thoroughly translucent and soft, then scrape it all into mixing bowl and mix on medium speed for 1 minute to disperse everything. Then whisk in the yeast and allow the mixture to stand for about 15 minutes, whence it should start to be forming bubbles from the action of the yeast.
Add the warm water, kosher salt, the caraway seeds, the gluten flour, the rye flour, and 1 cup of white flour. (Gluten flour or "vital wheat gluten" as it's sometimes sold is rather costly stuff but you only need a little at a time and even a small quantity vastly improves the texture of baked goods, especially when using flours such as rye flour that do not develop gluten of their own on kneading.) Start mixing with the bread hook on low speed, increasing to medium as the flours are incorporated. When well mixed the dough will still be very sticky at this point. (Even when diluted with wheat flours, rye flour tends to produce sticky doughs.) Add more white flour, a couple of tablespoons at a time, giving each portion plenty of time to be kneaded in, stopping when the dough ceases to stick to the sides of the bowl and to the bread hook. Finally leave the dough to knead at medium speed for another 5 minutes. At the end of this time the dough will be only slightly sticky, leaving the sides of the bowl fairly clean. Remove the dough from the mixing bowl, wipe the sides of the bowl down with cooking oil, place the dough back in, cover the bowl with cling wrap, and place in a warm spot to rise to at least double its bulk, which should take about an hour.
When the dough is risen, take it out of the bowl and divide it as best as possible into eight portions. Roll out each portion with the hands into a roughly cylindrical rope about 8" long and perhaps 1" wide. Lay the rolls of dough onto a baking sheet that's been wiped with cooking oil and then sprinkled with a thin, even layer of corn meal, leaving about a half-inch between each roll. When they're all in, cover up the baking sheet loosely with cling wrap and allow to rise again for about 30 minutes, after which time the rolls should be about double their original height and grown together. Pop the sheet into a 375 °F oven for ten minutes, then give the sheet a half-turn in the oven and bake for about ten minutes longer or until the tops of the rolls are golden brown. Remove the rolls from the oven, allow them to cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes, then transfer them to a wire cooling rack for at least 30 minutes before cutting into one. Serve with a Polish sausage and plenty of spicy mustard.
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