Hot dog and homemade buns

This is a pan specific to East Coast style hot dog buns. It is intended to be filled with dough as if baking one big flat rectangular bread, then use the indentions in the pan to indicate where to cut individual buns. Then each bun is sliced for a hot dog.

I am not using the pan how the pan is designed to be used. I am using it otherwise. Hacking the pan, if you like.

 The bottom of the pan is waved. The pan is made of heavy-gauge steel and coated on the inside with some kind of non-stick surfacing, but I do not trust that. Judging by the product photo, I somehow gained the impression that each compartment would be deeper and better defined so I was disappointed when I opened the box and saw there was little difference between this pan and a regular brownie pan, which in my opinion works nearly as well for how I use it.

Reviews about the pan on Amazon are mixed. Negative reviewers complain the pan does not come with recipes, that the user has no idea then how much dough to make for the best results. I can see how that would present an insurmountable problem.

I figured three ounces of dough per compartment. Just a guess. That would be thirty ounces total dough, by weight.

Hot dog bun dough. The dough is not shown because I have already shown that dozens of times and because it's a little bit boring. It is dough. A'ight? I figure, go ahead and make extra dough. Either throw away the surplus or make rolls with it,  but do not come up short. That would be tragic and unacceptable. Baker's percentages is a mathematic contrivance for bakers that produce batches in large bulks. It is a useful way to think about things. For me it is a way to see it forward and backward, flour to water by weight, water to flour by weight. I think the useful thing to know is how much water by cup to start out with for the desired end, and then approximately how much flour by cup that water will take because the regular person is using a cup for both those things and not a scale. This is backward from how many baker's percentages are stated. The exact amount of flour even by weight is never usefully stated due to atmospheric and climatic circumstances and by the nature of the liquids being used and by the variations in weight of other  materials going into the dough. Recipes always leave room to fudge the amount of flour by at least 1/2 cup, often more. So why bother being exact about it?  After all the prescriptions on careful measurement, the weight of sifted flour VS the weight of unsifted flour, the weight of a cup of flour in an arid environment VS a humid environment, how to properly scoop a cup, how to level it, the recipes then say, they all say, adjust with flour as needed. The inescapable point is, the baker must develop a feel for the dough, a sense of slack VS stiff, sticky VS dry, elastic VS resistant, alive VS barely active or dead. Online recipes for hotdog buns that I've read all specify milk, eggs, and often butter. Reading them I was left thinking throughout, "Bread dough fortified like this is a recipe for brioche." Is this what people want then, brioche for hot dog buns? Seems to me that brioche would be too dense a crumb for hotdogs or for sausage sandwiches, although it does make excellent bread. Sure enough, comments to the recipes report that by following the recipe as given the result is buns that are too dense, do not rise correctly, are too crusty, too heavy, etc. Faithful recipe followers were all basically complaining about having brioche instead of Wonder bread type buns of the sort they were expecting, which impresses me considering it is all right there in black and white at the start.  I feel another laughing fit coming on. Focus! These buns will have only olive oil as extraneous material this time. The dough will also start in advance with a poolish, a portion of the total amount of dough that is a pre-fermentation, and is started with commercial yeast, and made to be wet. It's a sponge. This will have several advantages. It gives the bread more character.  It makes the bread taste better.  It makes the bread last longer.  It uses less yeast, but that's negligible. It incorporates yeast death into the dough . ← I made that one up, but it is how I see it.  It conditions the dough.  It advances enzymatic activity and autolyse.  It makes the dough easier to work.  It makes the dough more extendible.  It takes less than a minute to prepare even if you are a spaz such as myself.  It imparts a lovely odor that tells you that you are on the right track and encourages you to persist. Convinced? Poolish started in the early morning hours. 1/2 cup water plus  1 cup flour plus  1/4 teaspoon commercial yeast. This is all the yeast that the dough is having. From hereon the dough is on its own.  Ingredients combined. Bang! Done.  The amount is arbitrary. It is also 50% water / 50% flour by weight, so very loose and wet, a sponge, not quite dough. Here, the poolish is 1/3 the total amount of water but less than 1/3 the total amount of flour, it could just as easily have been half the amount of total water and half the amount of flour. The decisions here were impulse. In baker's percentages, just for exercise, the amount of flour is always 100% and everything else is related to that one by one so the total is always more than 100%. So one cup  flour = 4 oz = 100% 1/2 cup water = 4 oz = 100 % so by the unique maths of baker's percentages, water is 100% to flour, which is very wet sponge. Go to bed. Wake up. Ignore the poolish. Take a shower. Have breakfast. Goof around. Play with dog. Watch TV. Fly a kite tied to the back of my bike. Put air in tires. Give two dollars to a panhandler. Do a crossword. Empty dishwasher. Read favorite blogs. Leave mocking and antagonistic comments. Check poolish. Oh my, that is beautiful. The smell is captivating. It is fresh and ever so slightly sour at the same time,  It mystifies me and holds my attention. It mesmerizes me. Hold me, I'm feeling a swoon coming on. No wait, that was gas. Twelve hours or so after starting the poolish it will now become proper dough. I decide not to add additional yeast, which is the customary thing to do, and instead relied on the yeast already active in the poolish portion to do all the work for the remaining 2/3 water and all the remaining flour that comprises the total amount of dough. The active yeast in the poolish will inoculate the remaining dough and take off from there in a wild undisciplined orgy of sexual and asexual reproduction and take advantage of the sudden influx of fresh food and new raw material. This will take a little longer than refreshing with additional  yeast in quantity usually 4X as much as the poolish was started but that's what I want.  1 cup warm water was added to the poolish and mixed. Flour was added by the cup, its effect observed with each addition. The final additions added by the 1/2 cupful. * Added 1 teaspoon kosher salt which is flakier and more voluminous than table salt. If I was using table salt, then I'd use less. If I was using sea salt, I would then judge its saltiness and factor its mineral content and its grind. * Added 3 tablespoons olive oil. This is the only extra material that differentiates this dough from a plain baguette type of dough. It does not match up to the sites I've read online that describe a more fortified brioche type if dough. Mashed potato or potato flakes would make the dough softer. This poolish and new water straight from the tap totaled  1 +1/2 cups, 12 oz. took 5 + 1/2 cups flour, 22 oz.  In order to stiffen sufficiently to enable it to be lifted from the bowl and stretched into a snake shape. Stretch and fold, stretch and fold, all the while judging its increasing elasticity, not allowing it to break, sensing it soften under hand, feeling it become more cooperative, more capable of adhering to itself but not to my hands. It is a thing of real beauty to behold and a source of unending fascination, soft as a baby's bum, although I never actual touched a baby's bum. It's a phrase, okay? The dough is set on the work surface and brought together into a single blob as if that would be one big boule. It is placed back into the same bowl that grew the poolish, and I'm off to other non-bread related activities for awhile. This will be its first rise (its second if you count the poolish) and I will not be too concerned about it. I will return to divide it into segments before it doubles. This concludes the story of the beginning of the dough.

The work surface is long. Underneath the work surface are two drawers. The divider between the drawers gives me a nice 1/2 way marker without having to measure anything. It doesn't matter how many inches it is. What matters is the dough snake is divided in half, and each half then divided into fifths to fill the ten compartments in the baking pan.  That's where judgement comes in. For the sake of SCIENCES, I am double checking with a trusty kitchen scale, but honestly, it is not necessary. The divided pan itself is a perfectly serviceable measuring device. I'm just trying to gain a handle for all future dough batches, and all that redounds to how much water to start with.

The segments are held under a dampened kitchen towel as each segment is treated as a separate loaf of bread. Each segment is stretched mostly in the direction that it is inclined to stretch having been a snake, then folded in thirds, then stretched again, folded again, this time in the direction that it is disinclined to stretch due to it having been a snake. It puts up a bit of resistance, but this folding and changing direction redistributes the yeast cells and crosses the direction of the long molecules of the protein network developed by stretching.

Each 3 oz. dough segment is stretched and folded, rotated, stretched mostly in the opposite direction, then folded again. Now there is a tiny dough pillow with loose ends that must be pinched and tidied.

The tiny dough pillow is stretched one last time into a short snake shape in order to accommodate a hot dog or a sausage. It resists stretching because its gluten protein network is crossed and not all lined up like before when it was a long snake. Had the snake just been chopped into ten pieces, then the internal structure would all be in alignment and much looser with a tendency to flatten and result in  gigantic air bubbles forming and finally with a much less reliable supportive structure. That is how baguettes and batons are fashioned, by pulling -- worked and stretched as a snake and then left like that. These keep snapping back to a pillow shape after they are stretched to a hot dog shape, which is good, they must be stretched and re-stretched possibly a few times until at last they fully relax and behave.

I see now that 3 oz. each is too much dough for this pan. Each little bun is circumcised as it were, so that they do not fill the pan with exceedingly tall buns all grown together.

Still too big. They are trimmed again. That means 3 oz. is too much per compartment for this pan, and that means the total amount of dough must be reduced next time if I should aim for an exact amount.

Painted with butter, especially between segments. The dough will rise together and tend to join. this butter will help keep the buns separate.

I return to the dough before it is fully risen. I want it in the oven before it peaks to maximum rise. It will go into the oven a little on the young side. Surprise! You're baked. The risen buns are re-buttered concentrating on the cracks between them in order to help keep the rolls separated since the pan divisions are so shallow as to be nearly nonexistent.

There was 8 oz. extra dough. This was divided into four 2oz. sections, stretched, and heavily buttered, then rolled up and put into a muffin pan. They are wonderful. All olive oily and buttery. These hot dog buns and the four rolls are extraordinary. You will never get anything this good at the grocery. Not even the bakery at the grocery store. They got nuthin', and I mean nuthin' over these. No brag, just FACT.

Conclusion: The same thing happened with this pan that happened with the square steel brownie pan. The buns grew together then rose up taller than they are wide. I don't like that. It results in an East-coast hotdog bun that one slices down the center through the top crust rather than laterally like a normal hot dog bun. This means I must, and you must if you use this pan, put  less dough per compartment than shown here. That is probably 2 oz. to 2 + 1/4 oz. dough per compartment.  That way they will be just as wide but not as tall. Although if you are aiming for dinner rolls then this is perfect.

Meats braised in shallow oiled water, covered at first and then opened to expedite evaporation, and then sizzled in the oil that remained to put a singe on them and crisp them up a little.

For the hot dog I didn't have sauerkraut so I soaked thinly sliced  bok choy in rice vinegar and sugar. It is quite good, better than sauerkraut, in fact.