A burger bun experiment

Furthering my inquiries into high-protein baking, I tried out a recipe for no less than the "Ultimate" keto burger buns. Based on my previous experience, I didn't have high hopes for it turning it as ultimate as indicated. Sure enough, what the recipe calls a "batter" that can be poured into the forms turned into a sticky dough that had to be scraped out with a spatula and sat stiffly in the forms. After 18 minutes of baking, as suggested, they were nicely browned, but didn't rise much, and were tough and crumbly:


This recipe, however, has a link to the (an) almond flour, and in one of the pictures the nutrition info was visible (not explicitly listed, alas), and it listed about 50% fat, where my almond flour comes with 10%, having being partly de-oiled. So I figured - maybe adding back some fat would help?

Thus experiment #1: To a half recipe I added 50 g of canola oil. I also instead of the staff blender used the exceedingly handy beater whisk from Normann Copenhagen to beat the eggs a bit foamy.  This made the batter almost pourable, and certainly more batter-like, in a stretchy kind of way.



While these were baking, I tried a second approach (experiment #2), based on various intuitions and the fact that we have no problem with gluten. I used half and half almond and wheat flour, added a quarter teaspoon of baking powder and 50ml water. Again I beat the eggs foamy, then mixed the other liquids together before adding the dry ingredients. This was a decidedly runny batter that I could easily pour.

The oil-enhanced version (experiment #1) rose well in the oven, then fell a bit after coming out again:


They came out of the buttered forms very easily, and cut open disclosed fairly dense dough interspersed with large holes:


They were quite tasty, though not very fluffy at all. I think they could benefit from the baking powder the original recipe warns against.

The wheaty buns (experiment #2) did not rise very much - maybe the amount of water made the bubbles needed for rising break? They were pretty fluffy, though, just thin. I could try with some more baking powder, or half oil, half water for the extra liquid.


The other experiment I should try is just using our new powerful blender to blend almonds directly, getting an almond flour that would match what the recipe is based on. If that works, it would enable a number of recipes, at the cost of a more difficult flour making process.

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