hamburger buns topped with sesame seeds

The other day when I made these hamburger buns, based on Susan's (Wild Yeast) recipe for soft hamburger rolls.

What excellent hamburger buns!!

And easy to make too! Buns are SO much easier to shape than loaves! The only slight difficulty I had with the recipe was with the fractions of grams Susan called for. My fancy new scale isn't THAT fancy. It will not register partial grams.

The part I really loved about the recipe was the instruction on how to get the sesame seeds onto the tops of the buns. I've always sprinkled them on. But Susan has a much better method:

[S]hape [each piece] into a tight ball. [...] Roll the top of the ball on a wet towel to moisten it, then in sesame seeds.

How smart is that!? The seeds all go onto the buns instead of being scattered on the pan below.

I did make a couple of changes to Susan's recipe. I used active dry yeast instead of instant and decided to use only one egg rather than the two she called for. To make up for the missing liquid, I added a quarter cup (or so) of water. I also decided to add the equivalent of a cup of skim milk by adding powdered milk.

We used the buns for vegetarian burgers* garnished with cheese, bacon, red leaf lettuce, tomato, pickle, bacon (ha! why not?), mustard and eggplant relish. And that red stuff? It's beet salad. And that golden crispy stuff? Onion rings made from the left-overs after feeding wild yeast!

• Susan's recipe for Hamburger Rolls
• my take on the recipe for Hamburger Buns

* To make the burgers, we used chickpeas as the base, basically following our falafel recipe but putting in thyme, onions and garlic, rather than the middle eastern spices and coriander leaf. We were completely thrilled with the results and may never go back to ground meat burgers again....