Most meals are fairly easy to prepare using clean food. Our freezer is filled with our own chickens, local beef, pastured pork, lots of venison, and frozen garden produce. Our 50 degree crawl space under the stairs contains our potatoes, squash and onions, as well as several sagging shelves filled with jars of tomato sauce, salsa, and pickled peppers, as well as several pounds of local wild rice. We buy organic dairy products and organic flour, for making our own breads. Truth be told, we dine like royalty. There is no feeling of deprivation-except for having a good-old cheese burger and fries on a big, soft bun.
The burger is not a problem; we have 50 pounds of local, pastured ground beef in the freezer. Even the fries are easy, using our own red potatoes, scrubbed, cut into wedges, and oven-fried, for the best fries anywhere (I'll get you a video on how to make them). But what about the bun? I usually skirt this roadblock by making Patty Melts, using our own grilled Wild Rice Harvest bread. But the other night I wanted ½ pound burgers between a big, soft bun.
Do we opt for the commercial bakery buns, made using flour laced with glyphosate, and other ingredients we can't pronounce? Do we buy some organic buns, that have a good week on them, are not all that good, and are way too pricey? The only reasonable option I saw was to make our own. Making bread is one thing, but making a soft, delicious burger bun is quite another. Thanks to Peter Reinhart, and his epic book The Bread Baker's Apprentice, I was able to make some stellar buns- adapting his white bread recipe.
The best part is that we can use our Sunrise Organic Heritage flour, and organic dairy products, to make these low-guilt buns. All we need is a large block of time, which we tend to have quite a bit of these days; especially this time of year. There is not a lot of hands-on work, we just need to be on-hand at the crucial times.
The other benefit of making your own burger buns is the valuable learning opportunity it provides for your at-home students. What better classroom activity than learning to prepare your own wholesome food in your own kitchen-the kind of food that has nothing in it but what is meant to be in it. What better gift to give your children than nutritious food that nurtures a robust microbiome, and sends information to every cell in their bodies, to do what they are intended to do- build a strong body that supports a well-run immune system.
Besides the health benefits, it is also a biology lesson. We get to learn all about the enzymes that transform the complex carbohydrates found in wheat into simple sugars, which are then consumed by yeast, which then produce carbon dioxide and ethanol as a waste product. There is a lesson in measurements, and even a math lesson, as the dough is divided into equal parts. Learning about things like imaginary numbers may have value (somewhere), but this is real life learning, producing real life-changing results.
So, grab the kids, sit back, and watch how I made our delicious, low-guilt, burger buns. Then take the plunge, and whip-up a bagful. They keep for weeks in the freezer.