Hi Everyone
Yesterday I tried making some cheeseburgers using the method that the American east coast fast food chain White Castle uses.
Every time I try a new style of burger I make "Hokkaido" style milk buns.
This type of bun is quickly becoming one of my favourite things to bake. Its a pretty simple recipe .I would recommend giving it a go. The buns that result from this process are soft ,fluffy and golden brown and look and taste great.
To make these buns I started of with around 300 ml of warm milk which I added 7g of yeast to.We leave this until the yeast starts to forth up like this.
When the yeast has activated I worked in around 300g of flour and a tablespoon of salt and kneaded the mixture into a ball of dough.
When the milky yeast mixture, flour and salt are made into a dough ball its time to add one whole egg and one egg yolk to the mixture. You can add some butter if you like but I prefer this recipe without butter.
Keep the white of the second egg for later ,we will use it to add a glaze to the buns.
When adding the eggs you will need to work in a little more flour to make the dough less sticky.In the end you should have a nice dough ball that looks like this.
When the dough is prepared set it aside in a container and cover it with a tea towel. In around 2 hours time it should double in size.
While we wait for the dough to rise we can prepare the rest of the ingredient's. We are going to cook our burger patties on a bed of chopped onions.
Shape your burger patties in to square shapes around 4cm x 4cm each.
I used a chopstick to make small holes in the patties. This is down so that the steam from the onions can be soaked into the buns when we cook these patties.
When the dough is ready make each bun into a square shape roughly the same size as each pattie. Before placing them in the oven brush each bun with some egg white, doing this helps us achieve a lovely golden brown colour.
If you want you can add a little mustard to the beef patties before you cook them.This helps add some flavour.
When the buns were cooked in trimmed the edges a little to give them more of the White Castle square shape.
When we cut the buns in half we can see that we have achieved a soft fluffy interior...beautiful like little clouds :)
Its time to start cooking our burgers, put a layer of chopped onions in the frying pan add some bacon if you feel like it.
We are going to cook the beef patties on top of our bed of onions and bacon. Putting the buns on top allows the steam and flavour of the onions to be absorbed buy our flurry milk buns.
Take the buns of to flip the patties...
Then add them back to the top for another round of onion flavoured steaming.
When the patties are cooked its time to add some cheese and let it melt.
Time to add the litte cheese covered patties to the onion steamed milk buns...
Add some of the fried onions and crispy bacon...
Et viola! We have some very tasty little slider style White Castle cheeseburgers.
Only thing left to do is take a bite...These little sliders turned out pretty good but I think if I added pickles and my big mac style sauce I would have something even tastier that I could sell from a food truck..
For those of you who are not into hamburgers I would still recommend making the buns. I had enough dough left over to make a breakfast roll this morning...Look at this lovely golden brown crust...
So soft ,fluffy and spongey on the inside but crunchy on the outside.....
Perfect for a scrambled egg and bacon roll in the morning....
Wakey wakey ,eggs and bakey!
