Ingredients

• 1 1/3 cups warm water
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon yeast
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons canola oil
• 3 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup wheat bran
• 2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten
• 1 teaspoon salt

Instructions

1. In a bowl sprinkle the sugar over the warm water, then do the same with the yeast. Add the egg and oil and combine. In a separate container, use a fork or a whisk to stir together the flour, bran, wheat gluten, and salt. Add 1/2 of this mixture to the wet ingredients and blend. This is the sponge.

2. Let rise 30 - 45 minutes.

3. Add rest of flour mixture and knead for about 5 minutes. I use my stand mixer with the dough attachment. This dough will be sticky.

4. Spray 2 cookie sheets with cooking spray. Divide dough into 16 equal portions. This is a wet dough so instead of adding any additional flour, I weigh the dough on a food scale and divide it by 16. Then I weigh out each portion and put 8 on each cookie sheet. Don't worry about how it looks now.

5. Take a 4" biscuit cutter and place it over one of the dough portions. If you wet the inside of the cutter as well as your fingers you can spread the dough into a perfect circle by using your fingers to flatten it to the inside edge of the biscuit cutter. (These will be very thin but they will rise). Remove the cutter, re-wet the inside and use it to do the same thing to the remaining 15 buns.

6. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Let the buns rise until double in bulk, about 30-45 minutes.

7. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven 12-15 minutes until golden brown. Don't overbake. Cool the buns and then cut them in half for sandwich buns.

8. Edit Note: Since I first started making these I've made 2 changes. One is that I make them in muffin top pans sprayed with Pam. No cutting involved.

9. The other thing is that I use oat fiber instead of the wheat bran. I ordered oat fiber online. It is NOT the same as oat bran and is in many things these days, so I decided to try it instead of wheat bran. It is very high fiber, few calories, and pleasant tasting. Just use in moderation. In this recipe I use only 1/4 cup. It is 5 calories and 26 grams of fiber for the 1/4 cup. Also, it is more mild tasting than the wheat bran.

10. Each bun has 108 Calories; 1g Fat; 5g Protein; 20g Carbohydrate; 4g Dietary Fiber; 13mg Cholesterol; 124mg Sodium.