Hot Dog!! I'm Grilling Again

Griffin wrote:

....You think those rolls would have worked for my Italian Sausages?

Sadly not really. They are great for a standard sized hot dog as long as you don't try to put too many toppings on at once. Sausages and brats would be a little oversized for those. The KAF recipe I use has a different consistency than normal soft squishy white bread hot dog buns. Perhaps it is the potato flour, but the rolls are a little less stretchy and pliable. Overload it with too much meat or hard toppings & it would split. So you could do it, but it wouldn't be pretty.

Jim

Jim - I would love to bake if I had the time. I make a couple variations of a pound cake recipe that I found years ago. Make a few other from scratch cakes, including trying to come up with the elusive perfect holiday fruit cake. Make cookies or muffins from time to time. Have tried my hand at scones. I'd love to do breads and rolls and buns. Just don't have the time. Live in suburban Chicago with a lot of very good bakeries in the area. Grocery stores, fresh markets, and other what I call muti-ethnics have good bakeries with a wide selection of artesian breads and rolls. Even local WalMart that I go to when I absolutey cannot avoid it has a decent bakery.
Anyway ... Glad you're back. You're a good source - just like this whole hot dog roll topic.

Cactus1:
I can certainly relate to your plight. I live 30 miles north of Boston, and until 3 1/2 years ago I used to spend two hours commuting morning and night. Now that I work from home I have four hours of my life back every day to do with what I want. So I was actually saying why I make my own bread, and not necessarily why you should bake. I fully understand what the lack of time is like.

One possible solution would be to check out the book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. it turns out some of the best bread I've ever tasted and it really does only take about five minutes. You whip up a batch of simple to make starter dough in 5 minutes. It gets refrigeratred and can be used for up to two weeks to make four loaves of bread. On baking day you cut off a suitable sized piece of the starter dough to make your bread. The entire prep time on baking day also takes five minutes. Granted there is additional time for your rise and for baking in the oven, but these are things where you can multitask and do other things while those events are occurring. So it really does take about five minutes of dedicated time. With this book you can make a wide variety of bread and rolls, and the bread is truly excellent!

If you are interested I wrote a couple blog entries on my website about this process. Not being pushy, but this book is certainly one way around the whole lack of time thing.

http://blog.grillinsmokin.net/blog_main ... inutes.php

http://blog.grillinsmokin.net/blog_main ... low_up.php

Jim

My first wife passed away suddenly in 1996. She was an ameture gourmet cook and baker. First tuition bill for Le Cordon Bleu arrived the day after I returned from burying her. She had a cookbook collection that was approaching 1800. She had every issue of Gourmet magazine from the early 1970's through 1996. A file box of hand written recipes that numbered in the thousands. Her Dad was a Master Chef and Baker. He was the cook on one of the early expeditions to the South Pole. It is his and her fruit cake recipe that I've tried for years to replicate - to my knowlege it was never written down and died with them. I've donated or sold most of the cookbooks, donated the Gourmet's to culinary school at local community college, still have the recipe file box. Did keep some of the cookbooks - one that I still have is James Beard's "Beard on Bread".