The Easiest Whole Wheat Hamburger Buns

You know the quintessential American hamburger buns. They’re soft, squishy, have a nice bit of bounce. They so perfectly compliment a hearty burger or crispy chicken filet.

If you’ve ever attempted making homemade hamburger buns, you know that it isn’t as easy as it seems to achieve that soft, fluffy texture that buns are known for. The end product is still delicious in its own right, but it’s not quite what you were expecting.

When you think about it, it makes sense why homemade buns come out so differently than store-bought. Have you ever looked at the ingredient list on the back of a pack of hamburger buns? It’s excessive! There’s usually a ton of ingredients listed and lots of them feel unnecessary. Why do these need soybean oil or mono-glyco-whatever?

Fun fact: it’s those oddball ingredients that give store-bought buns their signature soft texture. Remember the whole debacle about Subways bread and the yoga mat ingredient? Look it up. That’s how the big guys get bread to be so soft and bouncy.

So how do you make homemade hamburger buns from scratch that are soft + fluffy but also made with simple, natural ingredients?

Some say it can’t be done, but I’m here to show you it can.

I’ve done it. See?

This didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t master making hamburger buns from scratch the first time I tried. Through a little trial and a lot of error, I figured it out.

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How To Make These Buns

These buns start with my Basic Sandwich Bread dough.

It’s a simple honey-wheat dough that always bakes up fluffy and delicious. A huge perk of using this as a base is that you can shape some of the dough into a loaf or two of sandwich bread and use the rest for buns.

I’ll provide instructions for this method and for using the entire batch to make hamburger buns.

What You’ll Need

You don’t need any commercial dough conditioners or specialty ingredients like vital wheat gluten or sunflower lecithin. There’s a lot of whole grain recipes that call for VWG or sunflower lecithin but those aren’t things I keep on hand, so I use recipes that don’t require those.

You can absolutely make soft, fluffy hamburger buns without any special ingredients!

You only need the simplest of ingredients:

• hard red wheat berries
• warm water
• instant yeast
• avocado oil
• honey
• lemon juice
• sea salt

Hard Red Wheat

For this dough, I almost exclusively use organic hard red wheat. It imparts the best flavor, in my opinion.

If you’d like to use a different grain, you absolutely can. Almost any other wheat will work provided that it has a high enough protein content so the dough rises properly and creates a solid gluten formation.

Other grains you could try are: hard white wheat, rouge de bourdreaux, einkorn, spelt. You can also mix and match your grains–I’ve done half einkorn, half hard red and loved the result.

When using hard white wheat I’ll often use an extra half teaspoon of salt to boost flavor.

I haven’t tried this recipe with bread flour or all-purpose flour or anything from the store, so I can’t speak for how well it works that way. I’ve only made this with freshly milled whole grain flour, since that’s what I prefer to bake with. If you try this with conventional flour, leave a comment and let me know how it went!

Warm Water

You want the water to be around 115-120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yeast

I long to find the fancy yeast Adam Leonti recommends in his book Flour Lab but I’ve struggled to find it. If you have sources, please let me know!

For now, I use regular red star instant yeast. I purchase it in bulk from Costco and keep it in a jar in my freezer to keep it fresh longest.

Avocado Oil

If you don’t have avocado oil on hand, by all means use olive oil. It can be substituted here without issue.

For avocado oil, you want to make sure you’re using pure 100% avocado oil. The two brands that offer that are Chosen and Mariannes. I buy Marianne’s avocado oil exclusively. It’s pure avocado oil and cost effective to purchase in bulk at Costco.

Don’t use vegetable oil or canola oil. These highly refined oils are inflammatory and should be avoided. None of the recipes or products I share will ever contain them. I am a major seed oil disrespecter. IYKYK.

Honey

I usually recommend buying + using raw honey, but in this recipe it gets heated so using not raw honey is totally fine. Raw honey is great to use for medicinal purposes and spreading on toast, but I do bake with “un-raw” honey. With this in mind, I’ll add local is best, and try to always buy organic.

Since I live in the PNW where Costco offers local honey for a fair price, I almost always buy my honey there. Azure Standard is another awesome option for purchasing quality honey at a fair price.

Lemon Juice

This is a game changer! I recently came across a tip from the ladies at Unsifted about adding lemon juice to your dough when working with freshly milled flour. Evidently, there’s a chemical reaction happens that results in softer bread. It was recommended to add 1 tablespoon of acid per 3 cups of grain, so this recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. I use organic bottled lemon juice for convenience sake.

Sea Salt

I always bake with Redmond’s Real Salt.

It’s made in America (Utah specifically) and full of trace minerals.

Celtic grey sea salt is another great option. Really, the idea is just to be using a salt that has trace minerals and is more minimally processed than your standard table salt.

Don’t skimp on the salt. When you’re baking with simple ingredients like this, using salt makes all the difference in flavor.

Equipment

Other than a grain mill, you don’t need anything special to make these whole wheat hamburger buns.

A stand mixer or bread machine helps speed up the kneading process, but it’s doable to knead by hand if you don’t have another way. I currently use a cheap stand mixer from Walmart, but I have my eye on this Bosch one–the way it’s constructed, it’s better suited for heavy duty kneading compared to a typical Kitchenaid.

When you cook and bake everything almost entirely from scratch, good mixing bowls are a must. I’m still on the hunt for the perfect set. For now, I use a mix of plastic and stainless steel. We move cross-country in the spring, so I’m waiting to upgrade any kitchen supplies until after that happens. A couple clean mixing bowls is all you need for this. Nothing fancy.

I use the bowl of my stand mixer, and one medium size mixing bowl (I believe it’s a 2 qt)

You’ll need a large cutting board, pastry mat or clean countertop for shaping your dough.

I use a dough scraper to turn the proofed dough out of the bowl, and to divide it into bun portions.

You don’t need loaf pans for the buns, but you do need a solid baking sheet or two depending on how many buns you plan to make. I use half sheet pans and can fit about a dozen buns per sheet.

Parchment paper is a godsend in my kitchen. It makes cleanup easier, its nontoxic, it’s easy. Love it.

What You’ll Do

Now that you’ve gathered your ingredients and equipment, it’s time to get to work.

Mill Your Flour

First steps first, it’s time to mill your hard red wheat berries into a fine flour.

To do this with my Nutrimill Harvest, I twist the top so the stones are almost touching but not quite.

You’ll mill 6 cups of wheat berries. This ends up as about 9ish cups of flour. I mill this into a medium or large mixing bowl.

You take 3 cups of that flour, and add it to the bowl of your stand mixer.

In that same stand mixer bowl with the flour, you’re going to add 3 + 3/4 cups of warm water and 2.5 tablespoons of instant yeast. Give the mixture a stir, and let it sit for at least 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes have passed, the flour-water-yeast mixture should look bubbly and foamy. Add 1/2 cup of avocado oil and 1/2 cup of honey to this, and stir.

Pro Tip: Use the same 1/2 cup measuring cup for the oil and the honey, making sure to pour the oil first. Don’t rinse the measuring cup, but pour in the honey and add that to your mixture. Using the oiled measuring cup to add the honey helps it come out of the cup so much easier! No honey left behind.

For the softest, bounciest buns, this is where you add two tablespoons of lemon juice.

Add the rest of your freshly milled flour to the bowl of the stand mixer. Don’t forget to toss in your salt.

Mix & Knead

Now you’re going to mix the dough on a low speed until it pulls away from the sides of the bowl and starts to look more like dough than batter. Once it pulls away from the sides, bump up the speed to medium and knead that dough. The dough is done kneading once it’s soft, stretchy and only the slightest bit sticky.

From here, you can choose to shape some of the dough into a sandwich loaf or you can simply use the entire batch for hamburger buns. For simplicity’s sake, let’s make all of this into buns.

Let it Rise

Gently shape the dough into a ball. Let that ball rest + rise for about 30 minutes at room temperature in an oiled bowl. Cover the bowl with a reusable bowl cover or a clean tea towel.

I splash a little olive oil in the bowl of my stand mixer and let the dough proof there. Our house stays relatively chilly most of the year, so often times I’ll let my dough proof inside the oven with the oven light on. Oven off, no heat. This is a great way to proof and encourage dough to rise when you live in a cold climate.

Shape Your Buns

After about 30 minutes, turn the dough out onto a lightly floured flat surface. Without punching down the ball, carefully divide the dough into 16 even portions.

Shape these portions into rolls but pulling over the tops and pinching underneath. This video helps explain it better than I can with words.

Set each bun a couple inches apart on a lined baking sheet. Once you have all the buns laid out, gently press down on each one so it looks a little flattened. When each dough ball has been flattened, cover them with a clean tea towel or plastic wrap while you wait for your oven to preheat.

Prep

Preheat your oven to 350 F.

I add my egg wash immediately before putting the buns in the oven. Can’t tolerate eggs or you ran out? Brush the buns with milk or cream. If you like sesame seeds, now is the time to sprinkle them on. You can experiment and customize these buns to your liking with toppings. Sesame seeds, everything bagel seasoning, poppy seeds, onion flakes, it’s up to you.

Bake the Buns

Once the oven is proper temperature, bake your buns for about 15-20 minutes. Check for doneness at 15 minutes. I aim for an internal temperature of 200 degrees when I’m baking both bread and hamburger buns.

Congratulations, you now have beautiful, delicious hamburger buns made entirely from scratch. Whole grain goodness at its finest.

Our favorite way to use these buns is with bison burgers!

What will you pair yours with?