Traditional Russian Mennonite Buns

These buns aren't just buns, they are a history lesson and a sociology study wrapped into a tasty tasty snack.  This bun recipe has been in my family for a long long time, possibly since the late 19th century.  In any case, my grandmother made them back in Molotschna, my mom makes them and so do I.  These buns are really general purpose buns, but particularly appropriate for Sunday afternoon early supper (Vaspa), or served after funerals, in a church basement, with cheese and coffee.  What makes them a bit different than what we usually see on the Fresh Loaf is that they contain a lot of fat, in this case lard, and they are shaped with a sort of "extrusion" technique.  

The lard content is an honest byproduct of the heritage of the buns. Mennonites (and of course lots of other folks) were in the past  a primarily agrarian people, and raising pigs was a big part of farm life.  Butchering and rendering produced lard, which was an important and primary source of fat.  Lard was used in day-to-day baking, long before the advent of "shortening" and other manufactured fats.  Lard has gotten a bad name in the recent past, but is now making a bit of a comeback because its healthier than previously proclaimed (by the margarine/shortening cabal).    In any case, these buns contain a fair bit of lard, in an honest, farmyardish sort of way.

The buns also contain a fair bit of sugar, which speeds the rising.  I appreciate that sugar and fast rising is anathema to some, but really its a practical way of making a buns much quicker, which is an important consideration when cooking on a busy farm or household. Besides, the buns taste great. 

The mystery ingredient is vinegar.  I really have no idea why there is vinegar in the recipe, but there is and I use it. Anyone care to hazard a guess?

The buns are shaped by extruding them between your thumb and forefinger and then being pinched off.  I haven't seen the extrusion shaping technique described (I haven't looked hard either), my Mom taught me how to do this and it works pretty well.  The pictures below and the description will hopefully inspire you to try it out. 

Here's the recipe

Mix: 

 1 cup Lard Try to get a non-hydrogentated lard, not all lards are equal. 

4 cups hot water.

The hot water softens the lard.

Add:

2 teaspoons Salt

1/2 cup Sugar

1 tablespoon Vinegar

4 Cups Flour

Stir vigourously until you get a nice sponge going. Because of the hot water used in stage one, the sponge will be warm.  If its hot, then let it cool down a bit before the next step.

 Add:

1 Tablespoon instant yeast (this may be the "non-traditional" part of the recipe, but it works well)

Gradually add in:

About 4 more cups of flour

At this stage you should have a fairly moist rough dough. you may have to add more flour if its too sticky. Go by what feels right, that's my Oma's way of baking.

Turn out on a well floured surface and start kneading, adding flour as required, about 15 minutes.

Cover and let rise until doubled, about 30 to 45 minutes. (There is a lot of yeast and sugar in this dough, so it doesn't take long)

The Shaping Technique

Here's the interesting part, this shaping technique takes a bit of practice, but once you get the idea you can shape buns fairly quickly.

To shape the buns, tear or cut out a section of the dough and grab with your left hand.

Make an open circle with your left thumb and forefinger, then push the dough through circle with your right hand, from underneath.

 The dough should be stretched through. 

Now pinch off the bulging dough ball with your left hand thumb and forefinger, and place the resulting ball of dough on a baking sheet.

Cover and let the buns rise until doubled, about 30 to 45 minutes, perhaps a bit longer. 

They should look very light and not spring back when depressed.

Bake in a 400F oven for 20 to 25 minutes, until nice and brown on top. 

Mmmm, these are good buns.  Slather on the butter and clover honey from the canadian praries, and it's just about the best thing you've ever had.

Bake on!

This is what I pulled out of my oven today, a good 2kg of dough worth. First a small batch of light rye rolls made somewhat according to the instructions for making sourdough italian bread that was posted here earlier by Dmsnyder i think. The formula does only call for white flour but as I live in sweden I find that breads should contain at least a small portion of rye!

I made the dough with 20% rye flour wich gives you a dough that handles exactly like a wheat dough but with greater taste and also a somewhat drier feel, due to the high ash content of my whole grain rye flour, I also topped them with a mixture of wheat bran and rolled oats so they resemble the kind of "fake healthy" bread you can buy in stores and bakeries here in sweden.

The other breads were two sunflower ryes as per BBA, made with 30%rye starter and really coarse rye meal for the rye content in the dough. Lightly toasted sunflower seeds make for a lovely taste, can´t wait to open these babies! I have started tt get a bit better at shaping since I studied Marks videos, that technique is far superior to my prevoius attempts. Now I only have to make room for the loaves in my freezer! '

Looking for old recipe for a sweet bun called "Haystacks." They were plain, sweet, yeasty, yellowish (like an egg dough) and shaped like a rounded haystack with a plain confectioner's sugar icing and toasted coconut sprinkled on top. They were bigger than a hot cross bun and smaller than a hard roll. They were not heavy or doughy and had only a dinner roll type crust. We would buy them back in the 1950's in a bakery in Bridgeport, CT for Sunday breakfast. There were a lot of different ethnic bakeries there so they might be based on some sort of braided European bread.

I can still smell the inside of that bakery and remember my fascination with the bread slicing machine! Anyhelp would be wonderful - S

We're completely distracted these days by our vegetarian burgers. The other day we decided to make them again, using 3 different kinds of beans: black, kidney and garbanzo.

We were going to serve them with pita that we planned to bake on the barbecue. We had toyed with the idea of shaping the discs early and letting them rise a little before baking and then I suddenly decided we nnnneeeeeeeded to have real hamburger buns and that we could bake them on the stone in the barbecue (as per GrapevineTX's post "Outdoor bread baking, gas grill and attempt #1".

The hamburger buns (or if you prefer: "shamburger" buns) were made with pita dough (all-purpose & whole wheat flours, oil and a little brown sugar) and baked in our gas barbecue.

After the buns have been shaped and risen, we put them over direct heat for about 8 minutes, turning them once to account for uneven heat in the barbecue. Then moved them over to cook with indirect heat until they were done (about another 8 minutes)... (our gas barbecue can be turned off on one side).

You can see why we keep getting distracted into making burgers, can't you? And as long as it's barbecue weather, we really can't stop....

• recipe for hamburger buns made with pita dough and baked on the barbecue
• recipe for vegetarian burgers

The other day when I made these hamburger buns, based on Susan's (Wild Yeast) recipe for soft hamburger rolls.

What excellent hamburger buns!!

So, I haven't posted here in Quite A While, but I made some hamburger buns the other day and thought I would share my results. I have always wanted to make my own burger buns, but the last time I tried over a year ago, they were heavy and too bready for burgers. We couldn't even finish our burgers, the night I served them on those buns! So I sort of let that idea pass away. But then a few weeks ago, I found a recipe posted on King Arthur's baking blog. I was intrigued by the method of forming the buns cinnamon-roll style, and I loved the idea of the onion swirl! So I gave them a try.

Well, first of all, they turned out beautiful. How pretty are those? The egg wash and poppy seeds really dressed them up. And the onion flavor from the dried onion swirl was really nice. Subtle, but still tasty. I added a little too much flour to this batch, though, and so they were a little more dense and heavy than I wanted. I really want homemade taste, but supermarket fluff, in my hamburger buns. So I tried them again the next weekend, added less flour (PJ says the dough should be tacky like tape, not sticky like glue, and that description helped me a lot). They were much lighter with less flour. So, I think the key to these is to avoid adding too much flour. I might try adding some milk instead of water sometime, too. It makes super light and fluffy dinner rolls, so it might also work well in hamburger buns.

(No, we didn't have french fries with our burgers that night. Instead, we had fried okra, straight from the farmer's market! Yum.)

Here are some multigrain buns from Bob's Red Mill Baking Book. They are easy and fast to make and very tasty. We try to use them anytime we have burgers, pulled pork(as shown) or any other sandwiches that are served on buns. (I know a fatty hamburger served on a multigrain bun may be counterintuitive, but every little bit helps doesn't it?) The only changes that I made are that I cut the recipe in half and I didn't have any millet flour, so I adjusted with bread flour. I also brushed them with water before they went into the oven and sprinkled with rolled oats.

Even though Santa Lucia Day is 13 December, I made Lucia cats so we could have them for breakfast on Christmas morning.

I wanted to make dill bread so used Floyd’s wonderful recipe for Potato Rosemary Rolls yesterday but replaced the rosemary and sage for a huge pile of fresh baby dill.  Then I added another huge pile of freshly ground black Tellicherry pepper.  We really like things spicy but I was afraid the amount of pepper I used would overpower the dill.  Not having made dill bread before (Tingull's looks so good) I also wanted to try using fresh dill to get a feel for the amount desired.  I ended up using 2 1/2 teaspoons of freshly ground pepper a