Category Archives: Buns

Dan Lepard’s Semolina Barbecue Buns

Hot from the oven

Made these wonderful rectangular semolina buns and a batch of Dan Lepard’s legendary soft white baps today for our back lane BBQ! (Click on the links for the recipes)

Was a bit flummoxed about getting the softish dough onto the tray, but realised that the best thing was to roll the dough out on to the paper to start with, then pick the paper up together with the dough and plop it on the tray.  I also made a bit of a mess of marking and scoring the bread but it mattered not a bit.  Every last one was eaten and enjoyed by all accounts!

Soft white baps and semolina buns on the way to the party..

We had some very fine Italian spicy sausages full of fennel seeds and chile with ours.

If you don’t know it, Dan Lepard writes a great baking column each week in the Guardian newspaper, usually with ingredients that are easily available and fairly straightforward techniques for the home baker to follow.

Edit:

Celia has made these and partnered them with some fabulous burgers in chilly Sydney. Have a look here! And here are Di’s, which look very professional indeed. And Ulrike’s very smart buns. And C has made a loaf of it here, which I think is a smart move which would give you that lovely bread without all the hassle of shaping it into buns!  I think Dan has created another winner here!

They seem really popular with kids, here are Christine’s, look at that scoring!  and here are Heidiannie‘s too being enjoyed by her family and every time I see them I feel hungry all over again and think about making another batch…. oh look I did… Click here!

Bialys for Mellow Bakers

Teaser….

A quick bialy post for Mellow Bakers, last one of the month; we’ve had French bread and a very serious rye and this is the fun one, so I saved it to now.

Some of the other Mellow Bakers who have made these so far:

Natashya at KitchenPuppies
Paul at Yumarama,
 Steve at Burntloafer

I read what the Mellow Bakers who have made them already had to say about using raw onion and breadcrumbs, and the consensus seems to be that they didn’t like them,  so for these I sweated some chopped white onion in a spoon of butter for about twenty minutes till sweet and golden and then added them to some Polish breadcrumbs I found in the cupboard. Don’t ask me what they were doing there, I think I went out to get Panko and came home with these one day.

The extremes I go to….

Made dough, folded dough, proved dough, then scaled dough into 12 pieces. Shaped dough into tight rolls and left on trays. Links to recipes elsewhere on the net below if you need one.

Looks organized doesn’t it?

Forewarned about the tendency of these rolls to spring back to life like some mad Bouncy Castle and either ping their toppings off, or engulf them, I left the rounded doughs for a lot longer than Mr Hamelman advises (well, I like to pretend that I did this on purpose but as you who know me might realise, I forgot about them)  and the dough was well and truly proofed and starting to stick together by the time I remembered again.

Fully proved

The good part was that the dough was pretty tired by the time I got back to it, so it was really easy to make the flat middle bit….

shaping the flat bits

And then, Dear Reader, I filled ’em and baked ’em, they don’t take long in a good hot oven, and out they came. Looking golden and smelling of hot onions….

….but they are chewy,  I think they are supposed to be. Sort of thing to keep you occupied as you wander through New York City early in the morning on your way to work, chewy because who wants crumbs down their work clothes, chewy, well just because…..they are

BIALYS!

Where is no 12?

Recipes for bialys on line if you want to have a go….Here’s one done in cups.   If you want Mr Hamelman’s version you might have to get the book, but it is apparently a standard sort of recipe.

PS  I’ve just looked them up on Wiki which says they are named after Bialystok, a city in Poland, so my breadcrumbs are appropriate which is a bit spooky.

Have another one ! Don’t mind if I do….

Can you freeze dough?

You know how you can buy frozen pastries and bake them. For some reason I thought that commercial stuff must have some mystery ingredient which allows this to happen. Surely any dough I made at home would not survive being frozen?  So up to now I have never tried.  A few weeks back I made a big quantity of a sweet enriched dough, and froze two portions of it wrapped up tightly in clingfilm.

I came across it on Friday evening and took one lot out of the freezer, put it in the fridge to defrost (as advised by Susieq on Dan’s forum)  and then forgot it till Sunday night (not as advised but I’m very forgetful).

Feeling guilty I moved it into the kitchen while we had supper to come up to room temperature, thinking all the while this is going to be hopeless.  So after supper, I rolled it out, part of the dough had gone a little bit hard, but I sort of ignored that, like you do. Then I brushed the dough with melted butter, sprinkled on a mixture of old cake crumbs (slices of cake, baked, and whizzed and frozen), vanilla sugar, cinammon, patted some sultanas on top. Rolled it up into a log. Sliced it into chunks, flattened them into 10 cms rounds, left them to rise (they didn’t rise much) for an hour, sprinkled a bit more sugar over the top and baked them at 180 Fan for 18 minutes and this was the result.  It works! Yummy!  And the dough takes up a lot less space in the freezer than bags of frozen buns…..

Sultana Buns from previously frozen dough

A Quick Edit to this post in September 2010:

Happiness is a well risen loaf of bread!

I have also very successfully frozen pizza dough and used it for pizza three weeks later and last weekend I used a ball of frozen pizza dough as the paté fermentée element in this delicious five grain bread I made for Mellow Bakers.