Thank you Tami... I am printing this out and will give it a try... I can hardly wait..

Hugs,
Carolyn

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

I agree with grainlady, how much dough you use depends on what size you want the finished bun to be. You'll definitely need to let them rise after shaping them and before baking. As she stated, 1/3 the size of the finished product is a good rule of thumb, so your finished bun will be three times the size of the dough ball, approximately.

I'm far too impatient to weigh dough or measure cinnamon rolls and I don't really care if they are exactly the same size. If I'm making a dozen rolls I cut the dough in half, then into quarters, and then each quarter into three approximately equal pieces, shape them and let them rise, then bake. Cinnamon rolls are the same, take the rolled dough, cut it in half, then quarters, then each quarter into three. You'll be really close in size without a scale that way.

I also think the recipe would be really easy to halve, except for those three eggs. I'd probably use two eggs and call it good, but you could use one egg and one yolk, or one egg and change your water to milk, or use one egg and a couple of tablespoons of oil. Or you could beat up three eggs, use 3/8 of a cup (one egg is approximately 1/4 cup) and make scrambled eggs from the rest. A recipe with this history was probably using home grown eggs which could be anything from a jumbo to one from a small pullet. They used what they had and so the two egg half-batch would suit me.

Good luck, and let us know how they turn out. Oh, and where in the world are you going to get lard, or are you going to sub butter?

Annie

Thank you! Grainlady, that is just what I needed. I remember mom making bread as a kid. She used the recipe on the back of the Robin Hood Flour bag. That's all I remember. I can use the bread machine for bread. I can make sour dough in the Kitchen Aid. That's about my experience of bread making!DD makes her grandmother's (DH's mom)and does great. She loves to make bread. I won't be able to knead it by hand, so the KA will have to do most of the work. It will probably be halved.

Annie, I don't remember my aunt having anything but cows on the farm, so who knows what she used for eggs. As for lard, that's easy. We have a couple of stores locally that sell it. I'll probably use shortening tho.

Tami...who is going to try to make these for Christmas Eve.

Tami, I use butter in my bread recipes. I also use coconut oil if I'm making it dairy free.

And I too would halve it the first time, and use 2 eggs..will just make it "richer" a touch.