I was looking through my cookbooks, trying to find some inspiration for the weekend dinners. When I found pulled pork on hamburger buns, I knew I had found the perfect meal for the Saturday evening. It takes some time to cook pulled pork, but most of the time it takes care of itself. You just have to add some wood chips and checking the temperature now and then. The rest of the time you can just relax in a comfortable chair drinking a beer or whatever you prefer to do.

The recipe was written by Jonas Cramby, a popular food writer here in Sweden. He has no formal chef training, I think. But he has a genuine food knowledge that he writes about with a humorous twist.
The recipe for pulled pork in this post is almost a copy of the one in his book. I just decided to replace some of the chili powder with some smoked paprika in the BBQ sauce.

There was a recipe for hamburger buns in his book as well. I decided not to copy that recipe. It was nothing wrong with it. I’m sure it tastes great and fulfills its function, but it was baked with instant yeast.
And I am a typical sourdough guy. I know that you will always get bread with more taste if you bake it with a sourdough starter than if you use commercial yeast. Therefore, I always try to replace the yeast with a sourdough starter if possible.

You can find a lot of good recipes for sourdough buns, but I wanted to do something that was my own.
A good hamburger bread should be light, soft and airy. At the same time, it must be able to withstand some meat juices without getting soggy. I wanted a brioche type of bun. But not too much brioche, so I decided not to go overboard with the butter. Feel free to experiment with the amount of butter, but whatever you do, don’t use margarine. It’s a grisly invention. Remember what Anthony Bourdain said. Margarine is not food for humans.
Milk, on the other hand, is excellent food, and it is also the secret to get soft bread. Most of the times you don’t want a soft crust on your sourdough bread, but hamburger buns is an exception. So I used equal parts water and milk for this recipe.