COMING OUT HOT! Bierocks (White or Whole Wheat)

This post is long overdue. I made bierocks and before I posed about it Blendra posted her recipe. So I decided I’d wait to post mine. Now, here I am, two months later, struggling to remember how I made them! I know I used this dough recipe, except I halved it. And I think I remember fairly closely the filling. So what are we gonna do? What I always do in the kitchen: Wing it!

Proof that whatever I did turned out awesome. Now if only I can bring it to life from pictures and my 31 year old memory!

Dough recipe (this is the halved recipe)

• 1cups warm water
• 1 packages active dry yeast
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1/8 cup margarine, softened
• 1/2 egg (I beat mine, then saved the other half for breakfast, I bet you could use the whole thing if you wanted)
• 1 teaspoons salt
• 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour (or combo of whole wheat and all purpose)

Combine everything in a bread machine. Give it a little stir to get it started, and let it mix and raise on the dough setting. Punch it down, divide into 12 pieces, and if you have time, let it raise a second time. I never document bread making. Mostly because I think it’s boring. But I could start if anyone thinks it would be interesting.

Now, onto the filling:

• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 jalapeno (seed it and cut out the white if you don’t want spicy), diced
• 1/2 a can of black olives, diced
• 1 package onion soup mix
• 1/8-1/4 cup milk (I just dumped a little in)
• 2 Tbs flour (again, I just put some in)
• Shredded cheese

Dice up the jalapeno and olives. I left the seeds and white parts in because I like stuff spicy. If you don’t, leave out the jalapeno all together, or de-seed.

Brown your hamburger with the jalapeno, olives, an onion, garlic, a little salt and pepper.

Stir in the soup mix.

Then I added the milk and flour based on another website I stumbled upon. It made the whole meat mix kind of creamy and reminded me of this sandwich mix Mom used to make. I WILL be making this again for sandwiches. YUM! I didn’t track how much I added because that site didn’t say. But it didn’t take much!

Then I shredded up some Tilamook cheese. Kristy was right, after eating Tilamook, I can’t go back to anything else! (Well, other than different expensive cheeses.)

Roll out the dough that’s been re-raising. (Raising it again makes it easier to roll out.) I roll out the dough fairly well because I’m using the same amount of filling for 12 bierocks as the original recipe suggested for 20 bierocks. Add a small amount of cheese.

Then add a decent spoonful of meat (12th of the meat mix) in the bierock.

Fold in the dough to seal it. The dough’s pretty stretchy and smushy because of how much it’s raised. So it’s easy to pinch together. But it’s also easy to over-stretch since it’s so stretchy. Just mash the folded dough together and sit it face down on a pan. You can also use a little water to seal the dough.

Awaiting its destiny in a 350 degree oven. Bake for around 25 minutes (until the dough’s browned on both sides).

Beirocky perfection!

Brush with butter (I always use a stick and rub it on, rather than melting and brushing on).

Mmmm… The meat was perfect. And it paired really nicely with a vegetable soup or other tomato broth soup, chips, or if you’re really creative you could even do homemade fries. Big Lots sells french fry seasoning!

As good of a closeup as I could get of the cheesy, meaty conspiracy.

ENJOY!

Update (7/12/11): I remade these with 50% white, 50% whole wheat and 1 Tbs vital wheat gluten, and they came out just as delicious. Here are some pictures!

The vital wheat gluten helps the dough rise.

 

Dividing your bread with a pizza cutter makes the process easier. I do the same thing with dinner rolls (which I’m getting around to posting).

This time my meat mix didn’t have the black olives, milk or flour used above. And was just as good!

Letting them take their final rise. I consider this similar to a final bow.

Give ’em a little flip half way through cooking.

Straight up perfection. Imagine how great my house smelled!

I swear I can smell them!