by James Bridges
For years, The Grainwright Burger Bun was our tasty little marketing soldier! At the peak of our bakery era, we were baking an army of them - over a thousand a week - my own recipe, all shaped by hand. It appeared, by name, on menus at around twenty different Louisville restaurants. Plenty of people found their way to us via that burger bun, usually before they knew we even existed, or what we were about: organic, local grain, proper sourdough, and Viennoiserie made with Isigny butter. The bun got our name out there. The sourdough and pastries built our reputation, and everything else kept people coming back. That bun was a Trojan - but it wasn't sourdough.
Unapologetically Yeasted. Creatively Versatile.
The OG Grainwright Burger Bun is made with commercial yeast, and I make no apologies for that. It was built for flavor, consistency and structure, never going soggy under a juicy burger, freezing beautifully, and production was fast and efficient.
It also turned out to be a wonderfully adaptable base, which the chefs and I leaned into constantly.
- One popup was doing a buttermilk fried chicken sandwich. For that I added dill seed and Aleppo pepper for a perfect pairing.
- A restaurant asked for an "umami bomb" burger bun. Discovering that shiitake mushroom can degrade gluten structure, I eventually landed on a blend of shiitake mushroom powder and MSG to get the punch without wrecking the dough.
- A chef doing a Gullah-influenced burger supplied us with benne seed, a heritage sesame seed, so we could add that to their burger bun.
- For Watch Hill Proper's confit duck leg burger (with black garlic aioli and crispy leeks), I used cuttlefish ink to turn the bun a deep black, then topped it with nigella seeds for a little extra allium bite.
- And for Lou Oyster Cult, I turned the same dough into a split-top, New England-style buns for lobster rolls.
So that little yeasted bun definitely earned its keep. It was the right dough for the job, and the satisfaction I got from seeing it out there being enjoyed was great. But somewhere inside, there was always a niggle, an itch to be scratched, an irrational irritation, if you will.
I Scratched The Itch And I'm Happy I Did
Because for a long time, I just couldn't get a sourdough version to a level I wanted. I'd worked with Ian Lowe's sweet stiff starter method before, most notably for the brioche dough behind our cinnamon rolls, but a highly enriched brioche and a burger bun are different animals. When I tried adapting that same stiff starter approach to a bun, I wasn't happy with how it turned out. The enrichment level a burger bun needs is much lower than brioche calls for, and the stiff starter didn't translate the way I'd hoped.
The shift that made everything click was moving to a sweet liquid starter instead. At the lower enrichment level a bun actually needs, the liquid version behaves better than the stiff one, and it comes with a practical bonus: it doesn't demand the same lengthy prep window to guarantee good results. I was able to build the leaven overnight, mix and shape the next morning, and have fully fermented buns out of the oven by early afternoon. Given how particular sourdough can be about timing, that's not a small thing.
What came out the other end is the Super Soft Sourdough Bun, and it's a completely different eating experience from the OG Grainwright Burger Bun. It's even softer, still no real sweetness, and no assertive sour note. Just the faintest hint of tang, maybe. It also makes an excellent hot dog bun in situations where a firmer structure isn't the priority.
If you're new to us, it's worth knowing where each of these bun recipes actually lives. The Grainwright Burger Bun, being yeasted rather than sourdough, lives inside the Bakers Club recipe bank, for members. We also have the yeasted Janie's Mill Sifted Artisan Bun, which they asked me to develop specifically for their high-extraction flour blend. That too is available in the members' recipe bank or on the Janie's Mill website. The new Super Soft Sourdough Bun, on the other hand, is out in the open for anyone to try. No membership required.
The Jury Delivers The Verdict
At a recent BREAD Talk where we talked about 'Everything Burger Buns!', we heard from one of our longtime members, Kathy, who'd made roughly ten dozen of these sourdough buns over just a couple of weeks. Her verdict: best burger bun she's had in years. She'd also stumbled onto something I hadn't spelled out in the recipe, that pushing fermentation right to the edge, to the point where the gluten is just beginning to give way on a bun or two out of the batch, actually produces the best results. That's the kind of detail that tends to surface when a room full of passionate bread bakers gets talking through their real attempts, questions, and near misses.
That's what BREAD Talk is for. Every recipe we put out gets tested by more hands than just mine, and the live sessions are where the troubleshooting, the substitutions, and the small tricks like Kathy's get shared and compared out loud. If that sounds like your kind of bread nerdery, Bakers Club membership gets you into all those conversations, plus the full recipe bank behind it.
Happy Bun Baking!
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