Hamburger buns

As a person who prides himself on my baking ability I always feel shameful when I am forced to purchased baked goods.  I feel that with a little additional planning the situation could have been avoided.

It isn't a coincidence that I have similar feelings about cellphones.  It seems to me that 95% of phone calls could be avoided if people made better plans in advance.  I realize the counter argument is, "How would you make the plans in the first place without the ability to talk on the phone?" to which my counter counter argument would be "That is what e-mail and Facebook are for and they don't cost me a dime." I realize by being one of the last holdouts without a cellphone I am becoming an inconvenience to everyone else.  I apologize in advance.  <end rant>

One of the biggest sources of angst when purchasing bread products comes from hamburger buns.  When I purchase them I rarely ever need a package of eight since it is just LJ and myself.  Every couple of months when I clean out the freezer I find a partially used bag of buns buried in the back.

Buns seem like they would be difficult to make because of their unique shape which was one of the main reasons I had avoided making them for so long.  Also the recipes online vary greatly in ingredients and approaches so I was unsure on which direction to go in.  After a lot of searching I finally settled on this recipe, partially because of the glowing reviews online and partially because the author sounded like they had put in some extensive research in trial and error to make the perfect bun.  I also felt confident since the recipe was based off a NY Times recipe where a lot of effort goes in to finding the best recipes.

I made half a batch and found the recipe easy to use.  I skipped the sesame seeds since we didn't have any on hand but that was the only change to the recipe that I made.  In the final shaping process, after creating the four balls, I pressed them down to make them a more flatten shaped which wasn't explicitly stated in the recipe but made sense for what the final product should look like.

These buns made for the greatest hamburger I've ever made.  To be fair though it wasn't just the buns.  I was using grass fed ground beef from Colvin Ranch which provided absolutely astonishing flavor.  The first time we made burgers using these buns and the beef from Colvin Ranch I included bacon and grilled leeks.  When I made burgers the following week again using the same buns and meat the burger only had cheese, mustard and ketchup and it was even better.  This may be the first time in the history of my palate that I would say something was better without bacon.  That is how good this bun and meat combo are.  You have been warned.