Spaghetti Buns are highly portable, non messy, and taste great! This is a home-brewed recipe, tried once and was smashingly successful. I came up with it after experimenting with my own home made pork buns modeled after the Japanese Butaman. Which I consider to be the Japanese Gods' gift to us mortals. The derivation that lead to this recipe came from my brother, who piled spaghetti onto slices of garlic bread and ate it as a sandwich. It is then my great pleasure to introduce this as-far-as-I-know-original-recipe for Spaghetti Buns.

There are two foods involved with this recipe. The bread and the spaghetti. The tricky part is, of course, making the spaghetti stay inside the bread with out the bread breaking open. As such you may ignore the recipe parts of this node (which are pretty damn generic anyway), making your preferred bread and spaghetti (or other filling) recipes, and skip right to the bun instructions, which is much simpler than you may think at first.


Ingredients:

Simple Bread:


Spaghetti:



Preparation

First we will prepare the bread. Put 1.5 cups of flour and the packet of yeast into a large mixing bowl. Heat the milk and 2 tbsp. of butter in a saucepan until near boiling, and then pour into the same mixing bowl. Mix the flour and milk well with an electric mixer or by hand, adding as much of the remaining flour as you can until the mixture is doughy. Place dough into a greased bowl and set in a warm location and allow to rise for 1- 1.5 hours.

Nearing the end of your decided rising period, prepare the spaghetti by bringing a large pot of water to a boil and then adding the dry spaghetti, stirring often. While waiting for noodles to soften, mince the garlic and onions, mix with the beef, and then cook thoroughly. Heat the tomato sauce in a sauce pan.

If you timed it right, you should be able to knead the dough and separate it into approximately 4-6 inch circles or rectangles, or any shape of your choosing (I had rectangles of about 3-4x5-6 inches, varying) before the spaghetti finishes cooking.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit

Once the spaghetti is properly softened, take a small mixing bowl and put a bit of spaghetti inside. Add meat /onion mix to taste. Here's where it's important, add about 2 tbsp. of tomato sauce. And mix until sauce is well distributed. The ratio of sauce to spaghetti is important, you don't want the spaghetti to be too wet and ruin the bread. You also would want to taste the sauce. So experiment a little, but be careful at the same time. Once the sauce is mixed into the spaghetti and everything is well coated, place about 3-4 tbsp. of spaghetti into the middle of your dough sections. Repeat the spaghetti / meat /sauce mixing and placing-onto-dough until you're out of either spaghetti or dough. That depends on the size of your dough sections and the amount of spaghetti placed on each. I had about 12 (rather large) sections of dough with medium amounts of spaghetti.

Put aluminum foil onto a baking sheet and spray non-stick spray onto it (or however you choose to do the whole non-stick deal). Once you run out of something, take the dough sections that do have spaghetti and fold the edges up and pinch the edges together, being careful to allow as little spaghetti sauce (or worse, spaghetti) out as possible. When I did this part, the buns resembled egg rolls that had not been deep fried yet. Place the buns seams down onto the baking sheet and repeat until you run out of room on the sheet, leaving an inch or two between each bun (it took me two baking sheets with my 12 because of their size).

Take the remaining butter, place it into a small bowl or ingredient cup, and melt it (microwave for 15 seconds). Brush the butter onto each bun until the tops of the buns are well coated. Then sprinkle on garlic salt, basil, and any other herbs you desire to your own taste (I smothered mine in garlic salt. Place the baking sheet with the buns into the oven and cook until the buns are golden brown, about 35-45 minutes.

Once they're finished you can throw them in the fridge, freezer, or eat them right out of the oven (Caution! Food Product will be HOT!). If you save them for later, threat them just like Hot Pockets that need to be thawed before you cook them. Just throw them in the microwave for two minutes and they taste the same as when they came out of the oven.




Copyright me 2005. I hope. I guess. You copyright recipes, right?