Everyday Bread #39 - Whole Wheat Brioche from HBin5 for Hamburger Buns

I've never made this brioche from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day before.  But I was pleased to see that it used 5 eggs (well, 6 if you count the egg wash, and you do have to count the egg wash).  Now that our backyard chickens are producing about 5-6 a day, we are beginning to look for ways to hide the eggs in various meals.

The brioche is one of the recipes that you have to be careful with, it has some errors on the page in the quantities of ingredients if you have the first edition of Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day (I guess I do).   The errors are corrected on their website; and they even give the complete recipe here, with corrections, because they care so much about this recipe, and know how much it matters to their readers.

What I really wanted was a way to make some Hamburger Buns.  We don't eat a lot of veggie burgers, but once in a while we will have some for a quick meal.  And I really hate that we have to pull some crappy store-bought chemicalized buns out of the freezer just to slap a veggie burger on them every so often.  This web page from HBin5 suggested that the brioche doughs were good for making buns for burgers.

Although the dough is quite wet, I had to mix up the final bit by hand, because the wooden spoon wasn't getting to the bottom.  This is some gooey stuff.

In less than 2 hours, the brioche dough had surpassed the doubling point.  It has been a long time since I've used vital wheat gluten (I'm trying to get away from recipes that use it), and I was surprised at how quickly the dough rose.  The dough has to be refrigerated before use.  My intention is to bake some buns with it tomorrow.

Day 2:
The dough continued to rise slightly in the refrigerator. 

 I measured out the dough: 85 grams per doughball, and flattened them out as per the instructions on the web site.  I didn't have any muffin tins, so these are all free-form.

I had some black sesame seeds, and for a few of the buns I also used flax seeds.  The baked brioche smells great, but it didn't really rise all that well, in my opinion.  The first batch sat for only 20 minutes, the second for something like 40 minutes, and the same minimal rise was seen on both.  But they are probably good enough to slice in half and use as hamburger buns.

We'll freeze some of them, but they were too fresh to resist for lunch.  We had them with goat cheese.

Notes to Myself:

• Try some of the other uses for the brioche dough, like that shown on Zoe's personal website, the blueberry lemon curd ring.  Looks amazing.
• This dough tastes very sweet, and that's odd because I used 1/4 cup less honey than the recipe called for (that's all I had).  I wonder if this dough can be made without any sweet stuff at all?