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As simple as it may be, the humble burger always seems to find ways to surprise us. Even once you’ve identified the best type of beef for the juiciest burgers and perfected your patty packing technique for maximum tenderness, there is still the little matter of choosing the ideal vehicle. With all the brioche, sesame seed, and even English muffin applications in circulation, choosing can seem less like a labor of love and more like a plain old chore. So, when selecting a bun is something you’d rather leave off the menu, the work of legends like the late celebrity chef, author, and television personality Anthony Bourdain can point to a path. And Bourdain powerfully favored the potato bun.
Not only did Bourdain spotlight the tuber carb in his tome “Appetites: A Cookbook” (written with Laurie Woolever), he also extolled the potato bun’s virtues in interviews over the years. “The perfect burger is the classic, soft, squishy potato bun,” Bourdain asserted in a video interview with Insider Tech before detailing his additional ideals. Those would include good quality beef and the sometimes divisive processed cheese due to its superior meltability, if you’re taking notes.
What a potato bun is, exactly, and whether you can make them at home
We love a titular foodstuff, and the potato bun is just that: a bun made with some form of potato. Some potato bun recipes incorporate mashed potatoes into more expected ingredients like flour, yeast, and dairy, and some use (also eponymous!) potato flour, which you can probably find at a decently stocked grocery store. You can also grab a pack of Bob’s Red Mill potato flour online. The potato’s super starch, in either case, is what gives the finished buns the signature squish beloved by Anthony Bourdain and so many others.
This is all to say that, sure, you can make potato buns at home, and you can also leave the world behind, go off the grid, and start a new life as a cattle farmer. Arguably the icon of the genre, top-selling Martin’s potato rolls are probably an outlying case where store-bought is just truly going to be better than homemade. The popular buns also happen to be just the right size to achieve Anthony Bourdain’s one-hand rule for better burgers.
