How to make your own burger buns

Do you ever find yourself holding forth on a topic you hadn’t realised you cared about? You know, someone asks you an innocuous question in passing about the merits of slow cookers, or the best way to grow cabbages, and before you know it, 20 minutes has passed and you’re still grandstanding.

There are a few topics that have crept up on me like this during my life: I have found out that I feel extremely strongly about pyjamas (pro), low-calorie cooking spray (anti) and the TV show Stars in their Eyes. And, it turns out, burger buns. I truly didn’t believe I had anything approaching an opinion on burger buns. But the moment I turned my mind to it, I realised that, to the contrary, I had very strong opinions on this apparently benign subject.

So what is required of a burger bun? Burger buns should be richer than the normal bread buns that you’d use for a cheese or ham sandwich: they’re contending with a lot of different fillings and need to be able to hold their own against the fat, acid and salt. They have to be soft enough that you’re able to bite through both halves and all the fillings without accidentally tugging the whole thing into your mouth, like a baby owl, swallowing it whole. You can achieve both of these things by using an enriched dough: a bread dough that has butter, eggs, milk or sugar kneaded into the dough.

But, if you add enough of that butter, eggs, milk and sugar, you end up with brioche buns – the sine qua non for most early 2000s pub burgers. For me, brioche burger buns are much too far in the other direction: I am big on structural integrity, and I don’t want my many carefully placed fillings to splurge out as the whole thing tumbles into a collection of golden, butter-rich crumbs.