How Do You Like Your Buns?

In my family, only my son and I eat breakfast. Hubs and my girl are weird. They usually skip breakfast. Occasionally hubs wakes up early and has breakfast. But guess what he eats for breakfast? A bowl of noodles. In other words, lunch. Me? If I wake up late and it's too close to lunch to bother with breakfast? I would still eat a light breakfast. Haha, actually I'm the weirder one. What I enjoy most about breakfast is the food - bread with butter, rye biscuits with nutella, cream crackers dipped in lipton tea, etc. If I eat breakfast, my day feels so much better already.

Lately my girl has told me sometimes she buys something at school if she's hungry before lunch. The problem with my girl is she doesn't like to eat bread. My son is easy going when it comes to breakfast. Bread, cakes, muffins, cupcakes as long as it's not cereal. I really wanted to bake something both my kids could eat for breakfast or brunch and I thought why not make savory buns.

It surprised me that I've never made savory buns. I have asked a friend before how to incorporate the filling and the step sounds easy enough.

On Sunday I gave savory buns a go and this is how they turned out.

Why do my buns always look like they have been assaulted? Maybe it's the lightning. Or maybe next time I skip the egg wash. My oven is rather temperamental and likes to burn.

I followed a recipe from this book - Natural Breads Made Easy. Don't be deceived by the title of the book. It uses commercial yeast. So not 100% natural after all. What attracted me to this book? It uses a 17-hour pre-ferment dough kept in the refrigerator. I wanted to know how the dough will turn out using this method.

The pre-ferment dough was mixed the day before. It uses a huge portion of the total flour and the result is a very dry dough.

This is what a 17 hour dough looks like.

 The 17 hour dough is chopped up to be mixed with the rest of the recipe.

After mixing the pre-ferment with the rest of the dough and a further rest period, the dough is super sticky. Extremely hard to handle.

For the filling, I went a bit overboard. I cooked some curry chicken fillet.

I mixed some tuna with onions.

 

 

I also grilled some luncheon meat. I used a less salty luncheon meat which costs a lot more than the saltier version. Grr...

I was a bit afraid the dough around the filling would be wet and under baked. When I examined the buns, I noticed there was a tiny layer that is a bit wet. This could have been due to the oil from the luncheon meat or the liquid from the tuna/chicken. I'm uncertain if this is unavoidable?

The verdict? A 17 hour per-ferment bun tastes okay. Yes, the buns are soft. But there's nothing special about the softness of the buns. Hubs said they are not fluffy. My girl did not object to the buns while my son said they were okay. While eating, he kept asking why he couldn't find any luncheon meat. I guess it was in the middle of the bun. That's another thing I should fix. I need to put a lot more filling and spread it out because once the buns are proofed, they grow bigger and there will be a number of bites without any filling and whoever's eating the bun will keep wondering when he will bite into something good. Personally,  I think Alex Goh's sweet buns are tastier.