Sausage Buns

A few weeks back I spotted some wonderful looking sausage buns on The Fresh Loaf blog, then I also spotted them in Bulgaria as part of the breakfast assortment in our local bakery and I just had to try them out.



However, searching for a recipe on the internet didn't result in what I was after - a sourdough recipe for these buns. What I found called for instant dry yeast.

But I still have loads of starter to use up in order to come down to the regular level! OK, improvise once again.

The bun should be a bit on the sweet side, to balance the saltiness and smokiness of the Frankfurter sausage. It should also be very soft.

Thus, I needed a soft dough. Thus I changed the feeding habit of the starter - 2:1:2 and this was thinner than pancake batter. I left it to feed up for over 8 h, but of course with little food, it only rose about 50% in this time. In fact it reached this point after about 5 h, but I thought I'd give it some more time.

Then making the dough, the starter was 480 g, so I added the same amount of water and 880 g of super strong white flour. This was all I had left, as I also made 3 loaves of bread earlier. The dough was very sticky, I mixed it for a few minutes, then let it autolyse for 30 minutes, then about 10 minutes further mixing at medium speed, during which I added 45 g honey and 20 g salt.

I let it rise for 2 h 30 minutes and folded it at 50 min and 100 min. It was still very sticky, but had a bit of a backbone to it.

And sadly this is where I got sloppy - of all I've learned about bread making, I completely ignored most of it. That is to fold it again before dividing, then divide up and fold each piece again before rolling into a string to wrap around each sausage.



I also realised that I had way too much dough for the 10 Frankfurters I had to hand, and thus didn't follow the recommendations not to wrap too much dough around each sausage. But it used up most of the dough and what was left, I made into knots.



It all fitted on four trays and they ended up proofing for between 45 minutes and 2 h. And because I hadn't worked the dough properly, it all splodged out on the trays, rather than rise upwards like it's supposed to.



However, I baked the sausage buns and the bread knots at 200 degrees C for 23 minutes and they were tasty and light, however the ratio bread to sausage was completely wrong. I think I'll try this again, with a smaller amount of dough, work it properly, add more honey, as it wasn't sweet enough and use big Frankfurters.

Oh, and I didn't have any eggs, so I brushed the bread knots with oil and sprinkled poppy seeds on top, and of course almost all of them fell off at the lightest touch. Lundulph had one of the knots as a sandwich with butter and cold Swedish meatballs and said it was very good.

Lots of things to keep in mind for next time.