Here is the sourdough English Muffin recipe that I have made several times. You can use all bread flour or half bread/half whole wheat as I do. These are cooked on a griddle or in a large fry pan for about 6-7 minutes each side. The recipe makes 10-12 and comes from Dean Tucker's book, Sourdough Cookin', 1976. Sourdough English Muffins 1 cup sourdough starter 2 1/2 cups flour 3/4 cup buttermilk 1/4 cup yellow cornmeal, plus 2 TB 1 t. soda 1/2 t. salt Take the buttermilk and the starter from the refrigerator at least 30 minutes before preparing the recipe. When all ingredients are at room temperature, combine all and stir well. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until smooth - or knead 5 minutes on low in an electric mixer, adding more flour if necessary to prevent sticking. Roll dough to a half inch thickness and allow to rest for 10 minutes. Cut with a floured 3" cutter. Sprinkle 2 TB of cornmeal on a sheet of waxed paper. Place muffins on cornmeal and press lightly to coat each side. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 1 hour. Bake on a lightly greased griddle heated to 350 for about 10 minutes each side, [mine did not take that long to cook] turning occasionally while cooking. Cool on a rack or serve right away. These freeze very well! I put 2-4 in a freezer zip bag when they are completely cooled and freeze.

Enjoy your family recipe! How much dough depends on how large or small (or somewhere in between) you want the buns. I weigh my dough balls on a scale so I have equal-sized buns. Using this method your buns will bake to the same size in the same amount of time. For small luncheon rolls - between 1-1/2 or 2-ounces. Just go up from there in 1/2 to 1-ounce increments until you get the size you want. Probably around 2-1/2 to 3-ounces will work well for most burgers. After you've formed the dough into a round ball (making sure any air bubbles are worked out), pat it into a nice round about 1/2-inch thick. I use my muffin top pans (6 to a pan - the holes are about 1/2-inch deep) to bake my large hamburger buns, and I have another pan (12-holes on the pan) for small buns. You can place them onto greased cookie sheets, or cover with parchment paper. The shallow pans I use give them a nice structure and they remain nice and round. Cover with plastic wrap for the last rise. Your recipe makes a LOT of dough and you may find you need to retard a portion of the dough (covered), or the formed buns on cookie sheets (and covered with plastic wrap), in the refrigerator in order to prevent the dough from over-proofing waiting for room in the oven. You'll have several cookie sheets and you'll want to bake them one sheet at a time, unless you have a convection oven. You could use the recipe for making more than one thing - burger buns, hot dog buns, and cinnamon rolls - all from the one recipe. Take your leftover burger buns, slice them, and wrap in a sheet of foil (I get pop-up sheets of foil at Sam's Club that work perfectly for this). I also like to add deli-sliced ham to the buns and freeze them. Pop the foil-wrapped Ham Buns in the toaster oven for 15-20-minutes for a quick lunch. Handle the dough with oiled hands, instead of flour. If you have a Silpat (or other silicon mat) place your dough on it for forming (loaf, buns, cinnamon rolls, etc.) and you won't require any bench flour if you handle the dough with oiled hands. You can also spray your counter with PAM for forming dough without using any bench flour (remember to oil your hands). Another way to figure "how much", a serving of bread is 1-ounce and a hamburger bun is supposed to equal 2-servings. There is some loss of weight from moisture drying during baking, so around 2-1/4 to 2-1/2-ounces will probably end up around 2-ounces when baked. Yet one more way... You can take the total weight of the dough and divide it by 3 and you'll probably be good-to-go. Four cups of flour in a recipe should equal approx. 2-pounds of dough or 32-ounces. Divided by 3-ounces per roll is 10.6 rolls. Divide by 2.5 and you'll get about a dozen. If you make the dough into cinnamon rolls or sticky buns, 1.5 pounds of dough will equal 12 rolls. Roll the dough 12-inches wide by however thin you want your dough (about 1/2-inch thick usually suggested to maintain the structure). Add your cinnamon-sugar - but don't add any fat - there is more than enough fat from your hands when you patted the dough out, and roll the dough into a log. Using a 12-inch ruler as a guide, manipulate your dough log to approx. 12-inches wide. Take a sharp knife and nick your dough log every 1-inch using the ruler as a guideline. Take a length of dental floss and use it to cut your dough on the 1-inch marks. Slide the floss under the end of the dough, bring the ends up to the top and crisscross the ends, pull the floss to cut through the dough log. If you want to make quick sticky-pecan rolls, grease/spray your muffin pans, add about 1-T. honey or agave nectar (just barely enough to cover the bottom of the muffin cup) and top with chopped pecans. Add one cinnamon roll on top, cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise to double. Don't be too generous with the honey in the muffin cups or you will find it spilling over the pans into your oven. Back to the topic... This is the general rule-of-thumb for most yeast breads when you want to figure what size it will be... The dough is approximately 1/3 of the finished size. You allow it to double in size before you place it in the oven, so that accounts for 2/3 of the finished size. The remaining 1/3 is from oven-spring, the amount the dough continues to rise in the oven. Now you can "eyeball" the finished size of any amount of dough you want to use for loaves, rolls, hot dog buns, etc... For hot dog buns, roll the dough to the size (or just a bit larger) and shape of the hot dog you are going to be using. -Grainlady

Merry Christmas, Tami, to you and your sweet husband. I'll watch for those pictures, I'll bet they come out great. Annie

This is a smaller, and more manageable version, of 30-Minute Hamburger Buns I used to make from the cookbook "Whole Wheat Cookery - Treasures From the Wheat Bin" by Howard and Anna Ruth Beck (1986). The recipe made a really HUGE amount of dough (so much dough you had to retard it in the refrigerator if you didn't have more than one oven and LOTS of pans to bake the buns on - or you risk over-proofing the buns before you can get them baked). The recipe called for 10-1/2 c. stone ground whole wheat flour and makes at least 4-dozen buns (I would scale the dough to 2.5 to 3-oz. for large buns, 1.5-2-oz. for dinner rolls, and for hot dog buns - make the dough cylinder about the same size - or a little larger - as the hot dogs you are going to use). The rule of thumb: The dough size is about 1/3 the size of the finished product. You allow the dough to rise to "double", and that accounts for 2/3 of the finished size. The oven spring (the amount the dough continues to rise in the oven) accounts for the last 1/3 of the finished size. And yes, you could really make the recipe in 30-minutes, especially if you are an experienced bread and roll maker. The dough is so fast because there is an inordinately large amount of yeast in the recipe (the 30-Minute recipe calls for 6 T. of yeast). It's not a really "great" bread recipe (there's not enough time for the bread to develop really great flavor), but when time is an issue, it's a go-to recipe. ;-) -Grainlady