New England Style Split Top Hot Dog Rolls

Chicago has several "gourmet" sausage spots, like Hot Doug's and Frank 'n Dawgs.  Frank 'n Dawgs in particular uses these awesome split top buns that are buttered and toasted on the sides giving a nice crunchy exterior, and while they are supposedly available on the east coast I've had little luck finding them around Chicago.  So after seeing an article in the King Arthur Flour mailer I set out to make some for myself.

The first thing was to source the proper pan to bake the rolls in, naturally I went to Amazon.com first and found what I was looking for.   This pan  was just what I was looking for.  Since I was about to go down to visit my parents, I just had it shipped to their address so I could try it out before I made the return trip home.

There are several recipes to find on the internet, the first one I tried was here.  The buns were tasty, but the first batch was a disaster.  I think it was just a case of bad yeast, the rolls didn't rise at all even after an overnight ferment.  I tried to dissolve some fresh yeast in a little water and knead it in which did get a little rise, but the final buns were small and dense.  I set the pan aside for a few months before trying again, this time I just went to the original source of inspiration for the recipe, King Arthur Flour.  The recipe can be displayed by volume, ounces or grams (which is my preference).  This is what I used for 10 rolls...

AP Flour          361 grams     100%
Water               222 grams       61%
Sugar                 25 grams       6.9%
Yeast (IDY)         6 grams       1.6%
Salt                       7 grams         2%
Dry Milk             28 grams       7.8%
Potato Flour        43 grams        12%
Large Egg            47 grams       13%
Butter (soft)          28 grams        8%

I put the sugar in the bowl of my Kitchenaid stand mixer and poured in 200 grams of water to dissolve it a little bit, then the yeast was added and allowed to hydrate a little.  Next I added the egg, dry milk powder, potato flour and topped it with the flour.  The salt was added on top along with the soft butter.  The bowl was placed in the mixer and the bread hook attached.  After a few minuted of kneading it was apparent that more water was needed, so it was added little by little until a smooth dough ball formed.  The kneading continued for about 4 minutes longer.  I weighed the dough ball after kneading and determined that 22 additional grams of water had been needed, good to know for the next time.  The dough ball was placed in an oiled bowl, covered with plastic wrap and allowed to ferment for about 2-3 hours.

The finished dough ball weighed 767 grams, so I scaled it in to 10 76 gram balls.  Each ball was flattened and rolled up as if it were a tiny baguette and placed in the bun pan that had been pre-sprayed with Pam.  I also sprayed Pam on a sheet pan and placed it over the buns with some stainless steel bowls on top as weight while they were rising.  The total rising time took about 65 minutes, toward the end of this time I preheated the oven to 375°.  The buns were placed in the oven with the weighted sheet pan still on top and allowed to bake for about 18 minutes, the the sheet pan was removed and the buns baked uncovered for another 6-7 minutes to brown.  They were allowed to cool in the pan for 5 minuted before turning them out on to a cooling rack.  Since I had to put the rack pretty far down in the oven, just above the Baking Steel, the bottoms weren't as brown as I would have liked, so I put them back in the oven (this time set for convection) to give them a little more color.

This is the final result, the rolls filled the pan up to the sheet pan cover, are full size and fluffy.  They also smell great!  Just before the sausages are ready I'll cut the rolls apart, butter the sides and griddle until crisp.  I think they will go great with the assorted sausages I picked up from Gepperth's Market yesterday.  I know it's a lot of trouble to go to to make something that play a supporting role for the sausage, but if you're going to spend the money on a premium sausage you might as well serve it on a premium (and home made) bun!  These are also the style of roll you would use for lobster rolls, but that will have to wait for another day!

Homemade pepperoni, homemade italian sausage pizza.

The pepperoni Italian sausage I made were good on their own, but they were made for a pizza!  On Friday I started the process by making my pizza dough.  It consists of...

100 ml beer (I had Sam Adams Boston Lager on hand, so that's what I used) 
250 ml cold water (Beer + water come to about 70% hydration in this formula)
2 - 3 grams instant dry yeast (IDY) (about 0.4% to 0.6% flour weight)
500 - 550 grams bread flour (I used Weisenberger Mills high gluten bread flour)
10 grams salt (2% flour weight)
10 grams extra virgin olive oil (again, 2% flour weight)

The beer and water are added to a mixing bowl and the IDY sprinkled over.  Then the flour goes in followed by the salt.  This is allowed to sit until you see cracks forming in the flour, which means the yeast has started producing carbon dioxide.  The dough is mixed for 2 minutes, then the mixer stopped and the oil added.  Next the half-mixed dough is allowed to sit for 15 - 20 minutes, this is called the autolyse phase.  During this step the flour absorbs all the water and the proteins that will form gluten hydrate, the end result is a shorter mix time and better flavor wheaty in the final crust.  After the autolyse the dough is mixed until it forms a smooth, elastic mass.  The dough is then balled, coated with oil, covered in plastic wrap and allowed to slowly ferment in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours to develop the desired flavor and texture.

The next day I removed a portion of the dough for one crust and allowed it to come to room temperature.  The oven (with pizza stone inside) was heated to 550 degrees for one hour prior to baking.  Once the dough was warmed up I started stretching out the skin until it was about 12 inches in diameter with the nice lip you only get from hand stretching and tossing.  The skin was placed on a piece of parchment and dressed with a simple pizza sauce (canned tomatoes, tomato paste, red wine, olive oil, oregano, salt and pepper) followed by some store bought cheese (four cheese blend by Lucrene), the Italian sausage (cooked) and pepperoni.  The pizza, still on the parchment paper, was slid on the the stone and allowed to cook for about 6-7 minutes until the crust was set.  Then the parchment was removed and the pizza allowed to complete cooking directly on the stone.  Once removed from the oven, a little extra virgin olive oil was drizzled on the pie, since the homemade pepperoni and sausage were pretty low in their own fat.  This is the result...

I was very pleased with both the pizza and the toppings.  The pepperoni, which was fairly dry and firm when eaten by itself, seemed to soften when cooked on the pizza.  This is also my go-to formula for crust, it has a nice yeasty flavor and good texture with lots of large holes inside the lip.  Great for dipping in garlic butter or ranch dressing.  Making the pepperoni and sausage at home may have taken a little extra time, but it was worth it in the end!

Homemade pepperoni

The Italian sausage turned out pretty good, so I thought I might as well make some of my own pepperoni also!  After doing some recipe research online, I settled on one to start with and made a minor modification.  The recipe I used is...

1 lb ground beef
1 1/2 tsp Morton's Tender Quick
1 tsp liquid smoke (omit if you intend to naturally smoke the pepperoni)
3/4 tsp fresh ground black pepper
3/4 tsp sweet paprika
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/4 tsp crushed red pepper
1/4 tsp anise seeds
1/4 tsp granulated garlic

The Tender Quick was a little tricky to find, my normal grocery stores didn't stock the product.  Luckily, the Morton Salt webpage has a product locator you can use to find out who sells what in your area.  The product locator pointed me to a grocery store named Strack and Van Til located at 2627 N. Elston Ave. in Chicago.  I'd been by this grocery store many times when going to Micro Center, but never actually gone in.  It's a pretty nice place with a HUGE produce section.  Anyway, after grabbing the Tender Quick I also picked up some of the spices.  The recipes I looked at while researching pepperoni suggested using ground beef with no more than 15% fat content.  I picked up a small package (1.5 lbs) of 85/15 ground beef and headed home to start making sausage!

After making the Italian sausage, I thought it would be a good idea to crack the whole spices this time.  I measured out all of the seeds, peppercorns and crushed red pepper (increasing the amounts by 50% for the extra 1/2 pound of beef) and ran them through the coffee grinder I use as a spice mill.  The cracked spices, powdered spices and the liquid smoke were added to the ground beef and mixed throughly.  This would probably be easier done with a stand mixer, but I didn't want to clean up another thing for such a small amount of sausage.


The next step is to allow the meat mixture to chill for a while in the fridge, this makes forming the rolls easier but can be skipped if you're in a hurry and don't mind being a little messy.

To make the rolls I put a piece of plastic wrap on the counter and placed a portion of the meat mixture on top.  The meat was formed in to a loose log shape and then I started rolling it up in the plastic wrap until I had a nice, round log o' meat.  To force the meat in to a more compact shape I twisted the ends of the plastic wrap using a rotating motion with my wrists to force the meat in to a more compact log and force out as much air as possible, then the ends were tucked under to prevent the plastic wrap from loosening.  These were allowed to chill for 24 hours in the refrigerator.

The next day when I made it home from work I set the oven to 200 degrees Fahrenheit pulled the pepperoni rolls out of the refrigerator.  I set up a half sheet pan with a wire rack, it's important that the fat be allowed to drain away from the sausage as it renders out.  Since the uncooked pepperoni was still a little soft I initially placed it on strips of parchment paper to prevent it from sticking to the rack.  After an hour when it was time for the first turn the pepperoni was firm and had coated with rendered fat, i rolled the rolls off the parchment directly on to the rack.  This seemed to work perfectly.


While I was looking at recipes online, I found quite a few that had the same ingredient list but with wildly varying cooking times.  Some called for 8 hours at 200 degrees while others only cooked for one hour at 375 degrees.  Since I didn't want to be up til the wee hours of the morning playing with my peperoni, I decided to go convection at 200 degrees, then increase the temp to 225 after a few hours.  The total cooking time was around 5 hours with the rolls being turned about every hour or so.  Since the temperature was so low this could easily be done with my bare fingers.

 When I removed the pepperoni rolls from the oven I used paper towels to pat the remaining fat off the surface.  The surface of the rolls was a little sticky at this point, so I used a pepper mill to coat thew outside with a little more black pepper.  The pepperoni was allowed to cool for a little bit, then placed in the refrigerator on a rack to chill completely.

I sliced some pepperoni off one of the rolls the next morning when I woke up.  Pepperoni is, after all, the breakfast of champions.  The sausage was dry, firm and the surface tackiness that was present when it came out of the oven was gone.  I was able to cut some very thin slices with my santoku knife and finally taste the results of three days effort.  The resulting pepperoni is fairly spicy with much less fat present than the commercial versions I'm used to buying in the supermarket.  It tastes like, well, pepperoni.  This holiday weekend I plan on making a pizza with homemade pepperoni and the homemade Italian sausage from last week.  So far I've made fresh and dried/cured sausages, I've been looking in to fermented sausages like Spanish chorizo but that will have to wait until another day...

Homemade Italian Sausage

My parents say they can't find any good Italian sausage where they live, so each time I go down for a visit I always make it a point to pick up some good sausage and take it down to them.  I don't get to visit too often, so I thought it might be a good idea to develop a good recipe for homemade Italian sausage that they could make on their own whenever they have a taste for some.  I've been perusing various websites for ideas on the spices to use.  This page has several sausage recipes and looked like a good place to start.  Since they won't need to make a lot of sausage at a time, I made a spice mix that can be added at a rate of 15 grams per pound of pork shoulder before grinding.  The mix I've started with is...

115 grams kosher salt
40 grams fennel seed
40 grams ground black pepper
8 grams smoked paprika
5 grams ground coriander
5 grams red pepper flakes
7 grams granulated garlic
8 grams sugar
5 grams caraway seed
4 grams MSG
1 gram dried oregano

I bought a boneless pork shoulder from Whole Foods, which true to form was VERY expensive ($4.99/lb)  The 4 pound shoulder was cut in to 1/2" cubes, and mixed with 60 grams of the spice mix and 6 oz red wine (I used shiraz in this case).  I tried a little microwave trick I learned while researching a pizza sauce recipe, it involves combining the herbs and spices with the liquid, then micrwaving it at low power for a few minutes.  This process intensifies the flavors if done properly, but I added way too much liquid.  It is supposed to be a paste of spices but was more of a soup.  Next time I'll just try toasting them instead.

Once the pork had time to chill down in the fridge for a few hours I set up the grinder attachment on the Kitchenaid with the coarse plate installed.  The dice size of 1/2" worked out great, the grinder screw was able to pull the pork through without requiring any extra help.  One thing I will change for the next try is to put the liquid in AFTER the first grind and let is absorb in to the meat.  The cubes of meat just got wet with a lot of the liquid pooling at the bottom of the bowl, this cause liquid to shoot out the front of the grinder as the pork went through.  Next time I'll wait until after the first grind at least so the meat can absorb it all.  The pork was put through the a second time to get a finer grind.  I tried to use the medium plate at first, but things were going through so slowly that I changed it back to the coarse grate.  This time I did need to use the push rod to keep the meat going down to the screw.  Once ground, I put the sausage in the fridge to allow some of the moisture to evaporate out for a few hours then packed it in vacuum pouches.

I fried up a few pieces of the sausage a few hours later just to try it out.  It was good, better than most of what I've found in grocery stores, but didn't have the intensity of flavor I'd like.  It may just need more time for the flavors to marry, could be because some of the spices I used were not as fresh as they should have been and would probably benefit from toasting the spices before using them next time.  I'll try some again tonight to see if a day to 'cure' has improved the flavor.