After I said morning prayer and cleaned up after my sourdough pancake breakfast, I made a batch of multigrain dough. I can’t give you the exact recipe, but it had white bread flour, a multigrain mix I brought (whole wheat, cornmeal and oatmeal), the leftover sourdough pancake batter, a cup of warm milk and a cup of cold coffee, along with yeast, a little sugar, salt, two eggs, and vegetable oil. I kneaded it a solid 15 minutes to make sure I developed the gluten matrix, which takes more time in a multigrain dough. After it proofed for just over an hour, I shaped six hamburger buns, four hot dog buns, and a sandwich loaf. Before long the cabin smelled glorious, and there was a week’s worth of bread cooling on the counter.
Although it’s not absolutely necessary to have them, I used special pans for the hamburger buns. I’m not sure if they are for buns or for muffin tops (I’ve seen them labeled both ways) but they make for a nice uniform shape. A hamburger bun requires about 2 ounces of dough, perhaps more if you’re serving a half pound burger. My burger for supper was more modest and the bun was a perfect size. The burger itself did not remain on the plate long enough to get a picture, but as you can see above, at least I managed to get a shot of the buns cooling on the picnic table on the front patio!
Now that I have the grill up and running, I’ll have to start experimenting with pizza. I’ve heard a lot of people swear by pizza cooked directly on the grate, but that doesn’t appeal to me as much as heating a pizza stone in a closed grill, which seems to me to imitate an authentic pizza oven more closely. They even make inserts for kettle grills that transform them into pizza ovens—I may have to make an investment in one before long. My long term goal is a wood-fired pizza oven for the west patio of the monastery---but more on that another day.
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