'west coast cooking' burger buns

this is a great cook book. and there's a cool story of how i stumbled across it...

i bought two used books on amazon, pleased that they were coming from a tacoma wa. goodwill store. also stoked that one of the books was a hard-to-find paperback on charcuterie (Grigson). 36 hours later the books arrived and Oh Shit! no Grigson. they sent another cook book that i did not order...'west coast cooking' by greg atkinson. no biggy, no reason to return a 5 dolla used book.

six months go by before i even glanced at the book. the title just wasn't that inspiring. so finally i'm thumbing thru it and i randomly open to a roasted beet recipe and boom, the dish was a fav of the author's former san juan island cafe. so the book gets shipped to my little island completely by mistake and then it turns out the author/chef used to live here. far out.

i got to spend a very early morning shift checking out the bread baking process at Bakery San Juan. very cool. they've got their shit down. to the point that i figure 'why go there?' trying to accomplish what they do in my kitchen. just buy their product. but as good as it is most of the white bread (that my family loves) is sourdough based. and if you spent a decade living in Seattle during the Nirvana days you're most likely totally burned out on Starbucks and sourdough. at least i am.

my chicken scratch notes converting  two of my fav Atkinson bread recipes to grams. also some mod's to make them more fail proof. for buns mix warm water, yeast, and @10 grams sugar and let stand till foamy, then add rest of sugar. warm milk but not quite to boil, remove from heat, add oil, one egg plus one egg yolk (reserving white on the side mixed w/ @tsp water and tsp sugar. this will smear over dough just before baking) combine all together in a mixing bowl gradually adding 667 g's flour and 10g salt till you've got nice sticky dough. feather in a bit more flour till you can just manage to kneed dough with your oiled hands, place in a oiled bowl, cover for an hour, divide into 12 chunks @100 grams/per, roll into 8" tubes, tie tube into rustic knot w/ ends tucked underneath, cover and let rise another 20 minutes, coat w/ eggy stuff, bake 20 minutes @350.

the other scribbles refer to atkinson's white sandwich bread recipe. basically awesome americana white bread in little more than 3 hours. i gradually increased his #'s until i got the right size/shape loaf that bakes in your average meat loaf pan. i like the glass 5"x9" by Anchor. oh and the #'s on the lower right half, the 1.4X the norm, 50 minute bake time (40 min will be too mushy).