15. How do I make soft buns?

The easiest way to get very soft silky buns is to use lots of pastry
flour (half pastry/half all purpose or bread) & plenty of fat in the
form of butter. This produces melt in your mouth types of buns.
People are generally obsessed with gluten content in wheat - if truth
be told you can make bread with pastry flour i.e. a gluten content of
8% or so.  Naturally, the character of the bread is different.  You
generally, want to match the character of the bread with the
character of the flour.  Generally, people are very obsessed with
high gluten flours which do indeed produce lofty loaves but if not
worked properly can also produce rubbery loaves.  Elizabeth David is
one of the few authors on bread, incidentally, who advocates looking
for flavour in flours rather than simply high gluten content - a
lofty loaf is a good loaf only from certain points of view.
Incidentally, buns and the like that I have baked with substantial
amounts of pastry flour have had no problem rising to normal
respectable levels.

One advantage of high amounts of gluten is the concept of
"tolerance". Tolerance means ability to withstand abuse - abuse like
overkneading, overfermenting, overanything.  High gluten flours have
higher tolerance.  This means that you have to be slightly more
skillful in using low gluten flours.  I would recommend using a yeast
dough rather than a sourdough as a starting point if you are going to
try to make buns with large amounts of pastry flour.  The reason is
you have to be very careful not to overferment this sort of dough and
it probably easiest to make a straight dough.  I have used sourdough
and got breads as soft as a kiss.

-Roland