Bryan Ford's Semitas de Yema: veganised and slightly bastardised

For my first bake from Bryan Ford's beautiful new book, I was drawn to these "semitas de yema" for two reasons. First, their appearance - and, it turns out, the method - is similar to Asian "pineapple" buns, hitting the void that is within me, now that I am living far from the Asian bakeries of my home town. Second, I have previously experimented with using sourdough in enriched doughs but never seen a professionally written recipe that relies entirely on wild yeasts.

Despite making a decision explicitly based on the fact of the dough being enriched, I had not given any thought to the obvious implication that much fat and sugar would be involved. Nor had I properly read the recipe and noticed the volume of dough to be made. It was only when I started mixing the final dough that I realised what I had got myself into! It was too late to scale down; but I couldn't bring myself to go full opulence. I cut the weight of these ingredients by about a third, and veganised the butter by replacing with a mix of vegan faux-butter and olive oil. Unfortunately my pandemic-inspired using-up of long-neglected pantry items had left me only recently without coconut oil, otherwise a perfect and already-vegan fat called for in the topping. For this part I followed the recipe's weights but used olive oil with the sugar and flour.

Speaking of flour, I used one that is new to me and high-extraction. The egg, I replaced with some chickpea cooking liquid I happened to have in the fridge, and about 20g of ground flax seeds. With all of these substitutions, I was deeply uncertain the recipe would work at all. Yet three hours after shaping, the topping on the buns had nicely cracked, and I preheated the oven. 

I've never eaten (or seen!) semitas de yema before, so I cannot speak to the authenticity of taste or texture. However, I can confirm that these are delicious, chewy but not tough, and perfect with a cup of hot, black coffee.