Baggy

I hadn’t joined King Arthur’s Baking Circle, but did because of the earlier posting recommending Moomie’s recipe – painless! Search for Moomie's Beautiful Burger Buns; it’s fairly close to the Hamelman recipe for Soft Butter Rolls that I used from his book. For the French style buns (plus conversion to US cups): T55 bread flour (or substitute all-purpose flour) 250g (2c) Sugar 5g (1¼ tsp) Salt 6g (1 tsp) Butter 12.5g (not quite 1 tbs) Milk powder 2.5g (1 tsp) Instant yeast 5.86g (generous 1¾ tsp) Water 175g (½ c plus 4 tbs) If using milk rather than powder, use one third milk two thirds water. It’s a rather wet dough, but agreeably soft to manipulate. Next time I try it, I’ll probably pull back on the water a little. Mix the dough to be elastic (I mix everything in a breadmaker rather than by hand). The recipe is a no-time dough but, as I used instant yeast, I rested the dough for 15 minutes before dividing and making up the buns. I made x6 buns which are on the smaller side (about 60g after baking). For a larger bun you might choose make up just x4 buns for this flour quantity. With the temperature at around 25C, the buns were proofed in 45 minutes. Bake for 19 minutes at 190C (375F) and, for a soft crust and extra flavour, brush with melted butter after baking. If you do a recipe search on Baking Circle for Soft Butter Rolls you’ll find a couple of recipes that include potato, which might be of interest. I hesitate to say this, but I only made the buns because I promised to do some grilling for a family party and needed to find the absolute best way to make the patties – turns out that twice-ground chuck steak using a plate with 0.8 cm holes was by far the best of the methods I tried. The buns were, I’m sorry to say, just a side show. [edited to get rid of a couple of unnecessary words]

Inspired by the thought of eating hamburgers in Paris I tried two recipes today for hamburger buns – one from Jeffrey Hamelman and the other from France, Laurent Morel. Frankly, it was a close call. The Hamelman buns (made with UK bread flour) were marginally lighter and drier after toasting, with a strong buttery flavour. The Morel buns (made with T55 flour) have a more subtle taste and were just a touch chewy. Taste tested under real eating conditions with twice ground chuck steak (no other additives), the French buns just won by a short head. The Hamelman recipe is fairly similar to the recipe proposed by Moomie on Baking Circle, with high sugar, butter and added egg; the Morel recipe has a touch of sugar, no egg and moderate amounts of butter. The Hamelman buns came out darker, looking more interesting. Once again, personal taste was the arbiter, not the recipe. But I’m intrigued by the potato roll. My experience of unworkable, sticky potatoes is associated with using salad or new potatoes – when making gnocchi, a floury potato is the only one that works. This time of year, all the old potatoes have gone so this may be the root of your current problem. If you have time, it might be worth making a standard loaf with the flour you have. Just add 60-63% water, 2% salt and 2% fresh yeast (or 0.82% rapid, instant yeast). If you have success, then you can be assured that your basic ingredients are up to scratch.

Don’t we want to rely on someone who has expertise and experience? The USDA grading system has proven itself to be a fairly good marker for the quality of a carcass, but as pointed out, the breed makes a big difference to taste and quality, as does the way the cattle have been raised and the food they have eaten. Identifying provenance helps, but is no better than a minimum standard (like USDA grading); and it still won’t help in the shop to spot a good steak from an average one. So I would suggest that recruiting and training butchers in traditional skills has higher priority than education for consumers (except to create demand). I want a butcher that is consistent – if he/she tells me that the meat is ‘good’, I don’t care if that means average or spectacular provided I know how to interpret it (just like a critic, you don’t believe what they say, but you know where you stand on a relative scale). I also want a butcher who has the technical skill to cut meat to bring out the best eating quality, not someone who cuts everything with a band saw. And I want choice of butcher and competition to encourage standards. We rely on the wine merchant to select/propose the estate and year from within a region, we rely on the cheese seller to tell us when a particular cheese is going to be at its peak, we rely on food critics to tell us which restaurants are good (or is it to help us avoid the bad ones?); and we should expect to rely on our butcher to select our meat. If the butcher tells us that because of the season, beef is not at it’s best, first, that should be reflected in the price and, second, I can make an informed choice about buying it (or deciding how best to cook it). Inconsistency is not a problem in itself, only the lack of reliability – plain grilling a steak and finding that the taste is not good is too late; buying a steak and grilling it with split pepper because the flavour is not at its peak is OK.

Now everything is looking good for the perfect hamburger bun (and hamburger)! I’m looking forward to hearing about the next episode – I’m sure there’s going to be a good story from your conversation with the baker. Maybe it would be prudent not to mention the particular purpose for getting hold of the flour…

lladrian, I have tried using organic T65 from Leader Price and found it had a disappointing taste and was very difficult to get any volume in my breads. If your flour is anything similar, then I suspect that the flour is the main reason for your lack of success. Weaker flours are perfect for cakes and cookies, but the death of a decent loaf, giving a dense, damp-feeling crumb. You should have noticeably better results with the Groupe Casino T55, but if you can find some imported US or UK flour this is a far better solution (or go and beg a couple of kilos of T55 bread flour from your local baker – legally he can only charge you wholesale price, so you may have to buy an expensive gâteau to show him how happy you are; I always get my flour this way when visiting France). Hamburger buns have lots of different variants and the best for you has to be whatever is your personal favourite. For me, a typical brioche based dough has too much sugar for a hamburger (fine for foie gras) and has much higher levels of butter and egg (upwards of 20% of the flour weight of added butter). This can make brioche a really difficult (and time consuming) bread to make. You could try the approach suggested by saucée, although with 10% butter and egg it might be richer than you’re used to, especially using a more mild French rather than the stronger US or UK flour. [but I may have misinterpreted the quantities suggested – I assume that they are flour based ratios.] Can’t really help with the potato roll as I’m not familiar with it. Give me some hint and I can give you a view. In any case, it sounds like a fun alternative. What are you planning to use for the patty?

David Ross, your experience of Lidgate (still open) and other similar areas is probably still generally true – there are butchers, but almost all are situated in the more wealthy residential areas that circle the centre of London (Notting Hill, Hampstead, Holland Park, Dulwich etc). I have lived in central London for a long time and the traditional butchers have been disappearing along with greengrocers. Fishmongers haven’t existed for even longer. I have the impression that this started some time before the major supermarket chains ‘invented’ their smaller format stores. Most owners seemed just to retire and with no family member wishing to take on the business, have given up their tenancy. I can also think of numerous economic reasons that tip the balance against small food retailers. It is true that I know where to go to buy meat as I have access to Smithfield, can root out a newly-invented traditional butcher at Borough market or can go to Waitrose (fresh meat counter). But this requires a special trip and doesn’t fit with the usual too-many-things-to-do-in-a-limited-amount-of-time, offers limited choice (still difficult to buy any offal except liver and kidney), generally the quality is poor/unreliable (especially at Borough market), and it’s noticeably more expensive! Have there always been good butchers and bad? Of course, and the major issue seems to be a lack of choice. I don’t bemoan the rise of the supermarkets, but I do object when I have no alternative option, although this has changed over the past few years as supermarket deliveries have become standard. Is all supermarket meat bad – no, but is there choice? No, generally a very limited range of cuts. Conclusion: no (fewer) traditional butchers because of (a) lack of demand and (b) the cost of doing business.

At the high end of the scale, presentation is at least as important to me as the recipe – so a book with no pictures fails to represent adequately the work of the chef. Most of the inspiration comes from the pictures so good quality photography is very important. Impressionistic images just don’t add value (here I’m thinking about books like Planet Marx) and sketches don’t seem too helpful, At the other end of my scale there are books that stand alone as a reference. I often will take just one cookbook with me when traveling and need something light. Often the recipe is printed opposite the picture; and that means I can’t tear out the recipes to leave the pictures behind so I appreciate books that have recipes (and photographs) all presented on a CD. As for number and style of photographs, relevance depends on the basis of each case. If I were exploring a new cuisine, lots of picture and explanations of techniques are helpful, but for a cuisine that I know, it’s just a waste of space. And I don’t subscribe to the idea that cookbooks are primarily a work of art; content before style always, please!

I can see that the smaller the bun, the larger the surface area so a tougher bun becomes more obvious! Can’t help but notice you’re listed as being in Paris – so what flour are you using? One of the problems I’ve had with supermarket flour is that they are low gluten (even flour labelled T55). Reducing the hydration of the dough is unsatisfactory as it still produces a cake-like crumb and tends to give a heavier loaf. I found that Farine Blanche Bloem from Groupe Casino is one of the best, but it really needs ascorbic acid to bring it up to suitable bread making strength. Hopefully you have access to some imported bread flour. For the ‘real thing’ hamburger buns typically have a fat added to them to make them more tender (soft); around 5% of the weight of flour is good (unsalted butter adds a fine taste). Some recipes add sugar, egg and/or up to 50% of liquid as milk – all of these add to tenderise the crumb but there is no consistency across different recipes. There is a world of difference in the approach to fermentation. If you are adding butter, there is no benefit from having a long slow fermentation and there are a number of recipes that rest the dough for no longer than 10 minutes after mixing, and move directly on to dividing and making up the bun shapes. This is good for speed, but does shorten the shelf life to no more than a couple of days (but being a soft roll, the buns freeze really well). Yeast tends to be higher than usual bread recipes – around 1.5-2% of flour weight is OK if you are using dried yeast. With a high level of yeast and using warmish water, proofing takes only 30-45 minutes. To keep the buns soft, you might try brushing the top of the buns with melted butter when they come out of the oven. If you’re going to top with sesame seeds do it at the start of proofing, not at the end. edited for clarity

Do it!!! You’ll never go back to supermarket bread again. I have a model that is programmable and mix all of my small batch doughs in it (Russell Hobbs Breadman Ultimate, although it may be discontinued) – it’s far more efficient (in a gentler way) than a kitchen mixer and can produce everything from a standard bake-in-the-breadmaker sandwich loaf (fully automatic) to sourdough rye breads and French baguettes (using the machine only for mixing the dough). Compared with kneading by hand, the breads have better volume, more taste and go stale less quickly. If you are looking for a breadmaker, get one that has an oblong tin, not a cheaper square tin (and I’m not sure there is any need for a model with two mixing paddles, especially as they leave two big holes in the bottom of the loaf). I would fully endorse the suggestion that you weigh your ingredients – small variations make a big difference to the quality of the finished loaf. And assuming you are using dried yeast, I would suggest you use Doves Farm Quick yeast or Tesco’s version – these two brands have the highest activity and are most suitable for the breadmaker (Sainsbury’s, Allinson’s & Hovis all have lower activity). I bake a standard wholemeal loaf around three times a week and have found that Waitrose wholemeal flour is the best of the supermarket brands (Sainsbury’s has been the least reliable for me). A friend suggested today that Waitrose Extra Strong Canadian wholemeal works really well if you’re going to make a 100% wholemeal loaf. Carr’s wholemeal flour is more rustic (and more flavourful), but gives less volume. Tesco strong white flour is fine for adding to not-100% wholemeal loaves, although you might want to look around for suitable flour for a white loaf (I find the Tesco flour leads to a slightly metallic-tasting bread). Once you get used to the timing, I spend 5 minutes loading up the ingredients and it’s great to have fresh bread waiting for you!

I wonder about the colour test – meat packaging can be flushed out with gas to keep the oxygen away from the meat and has the effect of slowing oxidation (fresher meat). Also, the lights used in the supermarket counters stop the meat from going dark. Don’t know if someone has some technical explanation for this, but both these treatments keep the meet pink, so the colour of meat is a probably a poor indication of quality. I was interested in the comment on grey meat. In the UK, apart from a few specialist wet-aged packs, there is no ‘liquid’ added (at least to beef), but supermarket beef often cooks out grey, even when correctly cooked for thickness. I wondered if this might be related to the steaks having been frozen before selling. What does confuse me (or maybe its part of the explanation) is that a rib-eye cut with two different muscles can produce one that is pink after cooking and the other part, grey and grainy tasting. As there are so few traditional butchers left in the hinterland of London, it’s hard to comment on differences with supermarket cuts.

Not sure how you are preparing the salt. Do you mix if with just a touch of water so that you get a slush? Like tino27’s suggestion, when it goes in the oven the salt bakes hard like concrete and breaks off in slabs with very few salt bits remaining – and these are pretty easy to brush off. Overall, the dish only works well with large salt crystals.

Our favourite winter topping is with sausage, but for a lighter, fresher pizza we go for: Base of minced tomato with oregano (concentrated down until a stiff paste) A few finely chopped scallions Fresh mushrooms (sliced and pre-fried to reduce the water & intensify flavour) Shrimp (pre-fried) Thin asparagus spears (blanched) Topping of mozzarella and Emmental Flours are mild and subtle, there’s no added salt and little fat. We avoided ham as it adds the copious amounts of salt already in the cheese, but I guess that a few slivers of finely cut pancetta would add extra pep. We tried substituting artichoke hearts for the asparagus, but, the flavour isn’t strong enough against the cheese.

Thanks for the input. Much appreciated!

I appreciate the comment, but would like to get confirmation. If the figures are total weights, then the largest saleable egg, the jumbo, is up to 10% smaller than in any other country. On the other hand, if these are net weights, then the total weight of a jumbo is around 74g (assuming 10% egg shell weight). This is right in the range of other countries where jumbo is typically >72g total weight. I don’t have any answer for NZ yet, but the size range is broadly the same as Aus.

Do you know if the weights given are the edible weight or total weight including shell? By deduction, if large eggs bought in boxes of 12 have a labelled weight of 600g, then the given size would be total weights. Is this the same as shown on boxes? Following your lead, I found the Egg Producers Federation of NZ and it has info on NZ sizes (Jumbo 68g, Large 62g, Standard 53g, Medium 44g, Pullet 35g). Unfortunately, there is no indication as to whether this is total or net edible weight. The fact that weights are presented in the context of production, I guess these are total weights (would make edible weight of a large egg to be around 56g). I wonder if anyone can confirm.

I’m researching for a food ingredients database that I’m building, but am having trouble getting an authoritative answer to the weight of an egg in either Australia or New Zealand. Is there a standardised grading system for size as there is in the US and UK (and what is it)? How are eggs bought (by number or weight)? And is there variation in size of egg between different producers? All and any info would be much appreciated.

It may be unfair to question the authenticity of the article based on the observation of six chefs producing only 200 burgers a day. My own experience of running a business in Cairo was, with unemployment running conservatively at 20% and with hidden unemployment (like all the 35- year old university students, not to mention all the government jobs), more likely to be double this figure. So when you employ an individual you actually end up employing his brothers, cousins and neighbours… Six chefs doesn’t sound so bad to me.

Keeping the water boiling has two enormous advantages. First, the turbulence of the boiling water helps to keep the strands of pasta separate and, second, the pasta doesn’t sink to the bottom of the pan where it can get stuck to the base. The end result is the pasta has evenly cooked and separate strands, i.e. not tough, uncooked clumps. As those who live up mountains know, there is nothing in the temperature itself that is important in cooking pasta – it just takes longer. For example: Altitude 1,000 metres (approx 3,250 ft) boiling point = 97C (207F) & pasta takes about 15% longer to cook Altitude 2,000 metres (approx 6,500 ft) boiling point = 94C (201F) & pasta takes about 33% longer to cook Longer cooking times and less vigorous boiling has a great advantage when cooking fresh pasta, particularly filled pasta like ravioli or ramen as Hiroyuki has experienced. This is because fresh pasta cooks in 2-3 minutes so the difference between al dente and mush is a matter of maybe 30 seconds and, if the centre of a filled pasta heats too quickly there is no time for any trapped air to escape causing the pasta to balloon and, in the worst case, to break open. If the water temperature is above the 75-80C required to cook the starch, a warm bath of 90C could be a better solution than a rapid boil (at least for fresh pasta). So, provided you take precautions to stop the pasta from sticking together, there is no reason not to cook at a simmer. To help the process, it is a good idea to stir dried pasta when it is starting to soften so it doesn’t stick to the pan or itself. With added salt making such a small difference to the temperature, I just need to research what effect it has on the structure of starch – I may be some time…

Do you think your mystery organ might be the spleen?

I wish I could help – it was a question often asked in the UK before a couple of mail order suppliers became better known. I tried mixtures of strong and all-purpose flour (50:50). It does give a dough which behaves like true T55 flour, but the taste is way off the real thing. There are a number of tricks used to get the texture the same – mostly involving over-hydrating the dough and the use of a starter (poolish seems very popular) to produce a soft, slack dough. With a high gluten flour this tends to produce a lighter, more open structure to the bread. You might try looking at the books by Peter Reinhart (readily available) or Jeffry Hamelman (more technical) for some specific guidance on making baguettes with US flours. As for taste, to hide the slightly metallic flavour of high gluten flour, sourdough baguettes seem to be popular. Sourdough (its equivalent) is also used in France but, unlike the way in which sourdoughs are used in the US where a sour taste is appreciated, should taste neutral even though they have much larger holes, less height etc (typically known as the baguette de tradition, although this may be a trademark of the Retrodor franchise). The baguettes made using sourdough (natural levain) by the best French bakers are indistinguishable in structure, volume, shape and taste from that made by using commercial yeast, so personal taste is everything For the authentic taste, you might try contacting some of your (authentic) French restaurants and asking them who is their supplier for bread flour. If not locally, then NY would be a good place to try. And, of course, there are better (and less good) T55s as well… (I assumed you're based in the US - if that's not the case, I can make a list of UK suppliers.) Please keep us posted as to what you choose to do.

The report of Ferran Adria stepping back from the business side is interesting. Since last November Heston Blumenthal has been doing exactly the same, passing up ownership (and I believe, directorship) of the Fat Duck etc. For Heston, this broadly coincided with a new business manager being appointed (and him getting a more commercial profile – acting as judge on sponsored competitions, appearing on adverts, etc). I can fully appreciate the very large amount of time taken in running a business – all of it unproductive, save for the platform it creates to do more (and hopefully better) things. Many entrepreneurs start off following a dream and then the reality of running a business kicks in! Unfortunately, the world of high profile celebrities from all walks of life is littered with business managers who have taken advantage of their position. I can only hope that Ferran and Heston have built in some independent scrutiny to avoid the potential problem. If it means that Ferran and Heston can continue to plough their creative and highly innovative approach and excite us again and again, then I’m not complaining. And don't you think it’s even better if they can get the financial rewards at the same time?

The formula we use as consultants (not in food service arena) is a compromise between: a) A rate based on the market salary and benefits for an employee doing the same job, e.g. executive chef (but adding on all costs, such as rent, legal fees etc, etc), factored up for the amount of time spent not being paid when you're marketing but not working on projects (usually 30+% of your time), and b) What the market will support. Obviously the better your profile, the higher the rate the market will pay. Frankly, the best method is a see what fee is reasonable given the size of job. If your potential client is going to open a restaurant with a projected turnover of $1 million, it’s not unreasonable (from a business perspective) to charge upwards of $50k – a cut of 5% (which is comparable to investment banker fees). On the other hand, a smaller fee and a good working relationship often leads to a more 'family' relationship with repeat business over a number of years. Given the high failure rate of restaurants, I really couldn't suggest that you take this route.

Thanks for the comment, and enjoy the season.

Thanks.

Gabe Quiros, did I understand that the not-yet-released-in-English 2005 has mini-video? Every time I wish I could speak Spanish. There are a few streaming downloads to be had around the internet, but the best glimpse I got was from Anthony Bourdain-hosted DVD ‘Decoding Ferran Adria’, although it’s not right up to date, the views are fairly fleeting and the DVD took ages to arrive. Do you know of any other places that show the elBulli kitchen at work?