Second-grader an expert on hamburger buns

Few people stop and wonder about the bun on that hamburger they are about to sink your teeth into.

Few think about the thickness of the bun or the color and consistency.

Second-grader Gabe Huddleston has your buns covered.

On May 25, the 8-year-old Bismarck boy and his uncle, Alan Edington, who is a Bismarck native and vice president of operations for the Tennessee Bun Co., taught first- and second-graders in Linda Boyer’s class at Danville Lutheran Schools a thing or two about buns.

This was a show-and-tell Gabe’s classmates won’t soon forget.

The youngsters touched and tasted the buns the company bakes exclusively for McDonald’s quarterpounders. The Tennessee-based company is the fastest automated bakery in the world, producing more than 1,000 buns per minute.

Gabe walked his classmates through the grading process for their buns.

“The sesame seeds on the crown should not be burnt or brown,” the second-grader said.

Edington asked the youngsters, “What happens if there are burnt seeds?”

“Customers don’t like burnt seeds, so usually they’re thrown away,” he explained.

Also, there shouldn’t be any wrinkles or cracks on the crown of the bun, but holes in the bun’s heel are OK, according to Edington.

“Buns are baked in a cup and gas has to escape,” he explained. “So a little hole on the bottom of the bun is acceptable.”

Gabe told his classmates, “Having a straight slice is important for toasting.”

“Toasted buns taste way better,” Edington added.

The students then took a bite of their bun and chewed while Gabe counted to 20.

If the bun stuck to the roof of their mouth, there was too much water in the dough or if the bun crumbled in their mouth, it was too dry.

The students also took turns reading out loud statistics about the buns made at the bun company, such as 60,000 buns are baked an hour there; 100,000 pounds of flour, 16,000 pounds of sugar, 6,400 pounds of yeast and 850,000,000 sesame seeds are used each day; and the dough made daily weighs 720,000, which equals the weight of a Jeep.

At the end of show-and-tell, Edington asked who wanted to take another bite of their bun, and a sea of hands went up.

“I really liked it,” first-grader Ellie Bergeron said about her bun.

Fellow first-grader Simon Ocker agreed. “It tastes good. I like the seeds.”

Gabe’s fascination with buns — the bread variety, that is — started in 2009 when he and his family took at tour of Tennessee Bun Co.’s bun-baking plant in Dickson, Tenn.

“We saw buns coming out of the oven and going down the belt,” Gabe’s mom, Stephanie Huddleston, said.

“It doesn’t sound very exciting, but we’ve done it with a small group before and they loved it,” she said of touring the plant.

At the plant, a quality control manager checks each bun for the curvature of the crown and the precision of the slice, measures the bun’s height and judges the color for the optimum light-brown hue. Even the coverage of the sesame seeds is measured using two-dimensional and three-dimensional imaging.

“There was something about it that entranced him,” Huddleston said. “From that moment on, he’s been in love with buns.”

A trip to McDonald’s finds Gabe inspecting the bun on his sandwich.

“Every time we go to McDonald’s, he grades the buns,” his mom said. “He looks for brown sesame seeds. If there’s a brown sesame seed on a bun at the plant, it gets thrown out.”

For now, at the tender age of 8, Gabe aspires to work at the bun bakery when he grows up. He even emails and texts “The Bun Lady,” Cordia Harrington, CEO of the bun company.

“He says one summer, when he’s older, he wants to work there with Uncle Alan,” Gabe’s mom said.