Cheesy Gochujang Garlic Bread Buns

A sweet and spicy delight

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Happy Friday!

This weeks newsletter (and any accompanying typos) is brought to you by a lovely dose of jet lag. I am currently spending the week in Birmingham, Alabama, my first visit to the American south, to teach a baking class with Bake From Scratch Magazine, a class filled with British classics. As it is my first venture into the south I also intend to try as much southern food as possible, I am talking biscuits and gravy, BBQ, coconut cake, banana pudding, really anything I can get my hands on. I am yet to settle into the new time zone and my body is currently waking me up at 2am (8am London time) and then gets confused why I don’t immediately jump out of bed. As if to check in to see if I am ready for the morning I then wake up at 4am. By the time 6am  rolls around I decide it is time to stop fighting and just get up. Thankfully, across the street from the hotel, there is a brilliant donut and coffee shop so I have decamped here to write up this weeks recipe, whilst enjoying a very large coffee and a blueberry crumble doughnut. I suppose there are some benefits to being up super early.

This weeks recipe was such a fun one to work on and its a smash hit, super delicious and looks like it came straight from the bakery. In the back of my fridge I had a container of Korean Gochujang, a fermented chilli paste from Korea. If you haven’t come across this delicious ingredient yet it is well worth buying and having a play around with. The flavour is spicy yes, but also sweet and tangy. It is the key ingredient to many Korean dishes and is a great kitchen staple. I have used in many non-traditional ways such as a fabulous gochuhang ragu, a simple gochujang butter pasta and today in this bun recipe.

The base of this recipe is my go-to bun dough, a perfect base for all manner of buns. From classic   cinnamon buns, to swedish semlor, it works a treat and it is a forgiving, relatively easy dough to work with, enriched but not so much that the dough is unbelievably sticky and a nightmare to work with. Once rolled out into a thin sheet the dough is coated with a compound butter, a spreadable paste made from butter, gochujang, sesame oil, honey and a whole bulb of roasted garlic. It’s layers of flavour, creating a fabulous final dish. But the flavour doesn’t finish there, I added cheese, because why not. Cheese makes everything better right? And not just one type of cheese, but two. The inside of the dough is layered with grated mozzarella and the finished buns are piled high with grated mozzarella. Oh and to give a little brightness, finely diced spring onion is added along with the mozzarella.

The finished buns have an incredible layering of flavours and as they bake the cheese leaks out a little and caramelises around the edges, giving the buns a little skirt of crisp caramelised cheese. If your mouth isn’t watering at this point I don’t know what else I can do.

Because I dont like making you buy an ingredient you are then left with without knowing how to use, I have listed a few favourite recipes from across the web which use the Gochujang so you can enjoy this really special ingredient to its fullest.

Spicy Gochujang Ragu

Gochujang Butter Noodles

Spicy Pork Sausage and Rice Cakes
(this dish, from Momofuku, was the first time I had ever tried gochujang, whislt on my first trip to NYC and I love this dish so much)