Potato Bun Dough for New England Style Hot Dog Buns: aka “Potato Buns #6”, “The Lobster Roll”

Recipe first:

Wet ingredients first:

• 290g water
• 50g egg (1 large)
• 50g melted butter (about 1/2 a stick)
• 25g sugar

Dry ingredients next

• 200g all purpose flour (I used Cairnspring Mills Organic Edison which has a sweet, buttery, and nutty flavor)
• 200g of strong, high extraction, bread flour* (I used Cairnspring Mills Glacier Peak)
• 50g of plain generic potato flakes (yes, from a box)
• 20g of whole milk powder (yes from a box)
• 8g salt
• 4g dried SAF yeast**

*terms like “strong” and “bread flour” are interchangeable, “high extraction” simply refers to how much bran has been removed, in this case, a lot making for a nice white flour.
**You could try the SAF gold, which is more tolerant of all the sugar in this bread (potato is basically just sugar) but SAF red worked just fine

Recommended Equipment

• Kitchen scale
• Stand Mixer
• New England Style Hot Dog pan
• Instant-read thermometer
• Medium sized plastic garbage bags (please re-use for as long as humanly possible)

Technique:

We are doing my Brioche technique here. That is, we are making a relatively wet batter, letting it ferment for an hour in the kitchen and then popping it in the fridge for an overnight rest. The fridge treatment does three things: adds flavor, develops the gluten, and makes the dough easier to handle.

Because this is a high-hydration, high enriched dough, it is very sticky. Chilling it overnight makes it much easier to handle the next day. Yes, this recipe takes two days but, the good news is that good bread takes time.

Place wet ingredients in the bowl of your stand mixer. Add dry ingredients on top of wet ingredients, always add dry ingredients on top of wet ingredients. Using the dough hook, mix your dough for about five minutes. It will be sticky and messy still and look a bit like cake batter.

If it looks like soup, then you have too much liquid. This is ok, because every person’s flour is going to be slightly different, just like everyone’s oven is going to be slightly different. You’re a human with a brain, you’ll need to use it! Add flour in 25g batches and mix until you have a dough that you can shape into a very loose ball using slightly wet hands.

If you want to you can mix this by hand, or with a Danish dough whisk. I’ve never used the latter but think it will work. Just remember that it will be very slack and almost like batter, that’s ok.

Once everything is mixed up cover the bowl of your stand mixer (yep, I use the same single bowl like a savage!) with your reusable plastic bag, one which you will store and use over and over and over again, or some other more sustainable method and let the dough sit at room temp for about an hour. Exact time isn’t that important. Just don’t let it sit out for more than an hour and half because you will risk overworking the yeast.

While it’s resting, clean out all of the sauces in your fridge – you know which ones I mean: the ones you used once, a year ago, and they are still in there getting all gross and sticky – and leftover food no one is going to eat to make room for your dough. After an hour, store the dough in the fridge and go read a book.

Morning of day two, pull the dough from the fridge. It will have grown and you will see holes in it from fermentation. Tip it out of the bowl and weigh the entire beast:

Now divide that weight by 10 and scale up ten pieces, all the same size.

Sprinkle a little flour on one part of your table but leave a space where there is no flour.

On the UNFLOURED section: toll those pieces into a ball by pulling the underside over and tacking it down into a rough ball, then flip it over and use your hand like a cup: apply gentle pressure as you roll the dough in a circular fashion until it forms a ball. They don’t have to be perfect, you’re just telling the gluten who’s boss. Put them on the floured section and let them rest for 15 minutes.

Grease your New England Style Hot Dog Bun pan.

Now, take one of those dough balls, and simply roll into a log. There are ways to make this fancier by shaping like a baguette but after 6 tries, this log it up method worked really well. One big trick: use the bun pan as a guide for how long a log to make. I make mine a few CMs longer because they always shrink back up a bit after a few seconds.

Place your ten logs in the pan and cover with your plastic garbage bag. See how useful that bag is? You wouldn’t want anything to happen to that bag, it’s your best friend. Did you know that you can clean that bag also? And! When it’s at the end of its life, you can use it to walk around the house and clean up garbage. Never just “throw out” your bag. Please, give it a name.

Heat your oven to 375F and let your buns rest until they are really puffy, like well over the brim of the pan.

Here’s a thing about ovens: ovens are like football referees, they are “inconsistent”. One day you’ll set it to 375F and your loaf will be perfect, the next day you’ll do the exact same and it will be slightly too dark. The reason for this is that there are a ton of variables which go into your oven temp: exterior temp, temp of the item being placed into the oven, mass of the item being placed into the oven, other objects in the oven and their mass, how quickly your oven can recover when you open the door, the reliability of the temperature probe, etc.

We think of that as “inconsistent” but it’s really just reacting to the inputs. And yes, that applied both to referees and baked goods. You have two options here: you can learn how your particular oven works and accept some variation in the results or you can invest thousands of dollars in proofing and baking machines and get marginally better results. I recommend learning to love and work with your oven.

Ok, so, at this point you are ready to bake and you have two options: egg wash or potato flour. I’ve done them both ways and they are great either way. For egg wash, take an egg and put a couple glugs of water (very technical) in a bowl and whisk it. Then brush that on the top of the buns and bake. For the potato flour, I just sprinkle some on top and bake. I think the latter look more “authentic” but for this batch I wanted to try an egg wash. From now on, however, it’s a sprinkle of flour from me.

Bake for 15-20 minutes, rotate once at 10 minutes, until an instant-read thermometer reads 195-200F.

HAHAHA! I also brushed butter on top of these. I don’t know why.

To serve: cut off one of the buns (between the lines) and toast in butter on both sides lightly. Then slice down the center of the bun, about half way, and split open. Stuff with lobster poached in butter, a hotdog, crab salad, shrimp salad, hummus, I mean, whatever you want!

(please note the last photo is from an earlier version of the same bread, with flour on top!)

Qq