Brioche Burger Buns

By stancec44

Ingredients

• 14.5 oz Egg, whole, divided
• 2.8 oz Sugar
• 7.1 oz Milk, whole, divided
• 0.53 oz Bread machine yeast, or dry active
• 0.18 oz Amylase (might omit - some reviewers did & they came out ok)
• 1 lb 8.7 oz Bread flour
• 0.71 oz Salt
• 7.1 oz Butter, unsalted, cold
• Oil, or nonstick spray, as needed

Details

Servings 19
Adapted from chefsteps.com

Preparation

Step 1

In the bowl of a stand mixer, combine all of the above ingredients and mix on low with a dough hook until the sugar is dissolved and the yeast is completely dispersed. Scrape down the sides of the bowl if necessary. The mixture will have a slightly brownish hue.

Burger bun dough is very soft and tends to slack out during proofing and baking. To help keep your buns nice and round, it’s best to bake them in a mold. Commercial bakeries have dedicated bun molds for this purpose, but they’re hard for home cooks to source. We created makeshift ring molds out of foil as a simple hack.

To make ring molds, fold several layers of foil into a long, thin strip as shown in the video, then staple the tail back onto itself. For a ring with a diameter of 100 mm, you will need to make a 36 cm strip of foil.

With the mixer still on low, add dry ingredients in small amounts until evenly dispersed. Continue to mix on low speed.

At this point, your dough should be pretty fluid, like a thick cake batter. Don’t worry: it will thicken as the starch continues to absorb the water from the milk.

When the dough starts to become firmer and more cohesive, increase to medium speed, add butter, and mix until fully incorporated. Continue mixing until dough pulls away cleanly from sides of the bowl, about 20–25 minutes

Place the dough in a greased container, spritz with oil, and cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate until dough is cold. This should take about two hours, depending on your batch size. The dough should be firm and tacky, but not sticky, when you remove it.

The point of this step is just to get the dough cold enough to work with, but you can leave it in the fridge for up to 24 hours if you want to divide up the work.

Place a piece of parchment paper over a baking sheet. Place foil rings on top of the parchment paper, evenly spaced. Spray with oil. Cover loosely with plastic wrap.

Working quickly, divide the dough into 80 g portions. (That’s the correct amount for our 100 mm ring molds—if you wish to make larger or smaller buns, scale the weight accordingly.) We like to use kitchen scissors to speed up this process and keep from warming the dough too much with our hands.

If you have more buns than you can bake at one time, reserve the rest of the dough in the fridge while you work batch by batch.

The process for forming buns is difficult to describe in words but easy to understand visually. Watch the video in Chefsteps for detailed guidance.

After each bun is formed, transfer quickly to the greased pan, placing each bun in the center of a foil ring. Keep everything loosely covered during this time so dough does not dry out.

Once all buns are formed, burst any air bubbles that have formed. Spray lightly with oil and flatten them slightly to make a burger bun shape.

Proof in a warm room, about 77 °F / 25 °C. Buns are ready to bake when they have just over doubled in size; this should take about two hours.

While your buns are proofing, preheat the oven and prepare your egg wash (Steps 9 and 10).

Combine milk and egg and mix thoroughly.

CHEF’S TIP: An easier way to apply an egg wash is to put the ingredients in a spray bottle and spritz the buns. If using this method, it may be necessary to thin the wash slightly with a little extra milk.
If you are adding seeds or toppings, this would be the ideal time. After you glaze the buns with egg wash, sprinkle toppings on them, if you wish. Try sesame seeds, poppy seeds, black lava salt, or...?

Bake at 347 °F / 175 °C until the buns reach a core temperature of 203 °F / 95 °C, about 10–15 minutes.

CHEF’S TIP: For best results, bake in a very humid environment for the first 3–4 minutes, or until the buns have expanded enough to reach the perimeter of the ring molds. You can do this by adding a pan of very hot water to the oven when you put the buns in.

Allow buns to cool before removing the foil rings. For best results, reserve in a ziplock-style bag for two days before using. This allows the crust to reabsorb moisture from the crumb, giving the whole bun a softer texture. If you like a crisp bun, reserve for two days as described, and then toast.

Tip
Visualizing oven-spring
The three buns pictured here demonstrate the effects of oven-spring on our brioche. The bun on the left had too much oven-spring and collapsed when it cooled, giving the crust a wrinkled appearance. That oven was probably too humid for too long, so a firm crust never developed. The one on the right didn’t get enough oven-spring, meaning the oven was probably too hot and dry. That bun will be dense and chewy. The center one is our preference—it rose into a nice dome shape but didn’t collapse.