I’ve really been working on eating fewer processed foods lately, and one of the projects I’ve started to tackle is baking my own bread products. I’m certainly no expert yet, but I was pretty proud of my hamburger bun baking efforts last week.

I’ve made whole wheat hamburger buns once before, and though they tasted good, they were really heavy. So I went in search of a better recipe to suit my needs, and after a little tweaking, I came up with a hit.

I started with the Whole Wheat Hamburger Buns recipe from Heavenly Homemakers. Then I combined it with a homemade dough enhancer recipe from Chickens in the Road and the overnight grain soaking method used in Nourishing Traditions. And this is the masterpiece I came up with.

Whole Wheat Hamburger Buns

• 5+ cups freshly ground whole wheat flour (I used hard red wheat)
• 1 1/2 cups warm water
• 2 Tbsp. cider vinegar
• 4 1/2 tsp. active dry yeast
• 2 Tbsp. honey
• 1/4 cup warm water
• 1/2 cup milk
• 2 Tbsp. butter
• 2 tsp. salt
• 3 Tbsp. dough enhancer

First I ground 3 1/2 cups of hard red wheat berries in my handy dandy Wonder Mill (I love that machine)! The general rule is that 1 cup of wheat berries will yield 1 1/2 cups of flour, so I ended up with a little more than 5 cups of flour.

Then, in keeping with traditional food preparation techniques, I wanted to soak the flour overnight. I’m not very experienced in adapting recipes, so I decided to wing it. I knew I couldn’t add extra water to the flour, as that would ruin the recipe. And I didn’t want to mess with the original recipe too much, either. So I soaked 5 cups of flour in 1 1/2 cups of water plus 2 tablespoons of cider vinegar.

In retrospect, I’m not sure the soaking did a lot of good, since there was so much flour, compared to the water. Next time I think I’ll soak three cups of flour and add the final two cups of flour to the recipe un-soaked.

The next morning, I combined the yeast, honey, and 1/4 cup of warm water. I let it sit 10 minutes, so the yeast could start to work. Meanwhile, I melted the butter, milk, and salt on the stove. It’s important not to let the milk mixture get too hot.

10 minutes later, my yeast looked like this.

Perfect!

I placed the dough from the night before, the yeast mixture, the milk mixture, and 3 tablespoons of dough enhancer into my KitchenAid Mixer bowl. I love that machine, too! I began to knead with the dough hook, until everything was combined.

The dough was still a little gooey, so I added in the leftover flour from  my wheat grinding session the night before. It was the perfect amount, probably about a half a cup. I didn’t measure. I continued to knead for 10 minutes.

It was a cool day, so while the dough was kneading in the mixer, I preheated the oven to 100 degrees and then turned it off. When the kneading was finished, I covered the mixing bowl with a towel and stuck the bowl in the oven for an hour.

When I took the dough out of the oven, it looked like this.

I rolled out the dough on my floured counter until it was about 1/2 inch thick. Then I cut it with a wide-mouthed canning jar. In retrospect, that was a bit small, so I’ll be looking for something bigger to cut the dough with next time.

I placed the dough circles on greased cookie sheets and let them rise for about 45 minutes. Then I baked them in a preheated 350 degree oven for 25 minutes and came out with hamburger bun perfection!

The buns were a bit small for our burgers, but they tasted great! They were wheaty tasting, no doubt due to the hard red wheat I used. But unlike my last hamburger bun experiment, these were light and fluffy. I will definitely be making this recipe again, though I’ll make the burger buns bigger next time.

For a less wheaty taste, you could try hard white wheat instead of the red wheat. I just happened to have red wheat on hand, so that’s what I used.

Too bad grilling season is just about over. I think I could eat these every week and not get tired of them!

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