Bagels

I threw a little brunch for friends, with homemade bagels, salmon and trout I smoked over alder wood, gravlax cured by H, dry farmed early girl tomatoes (so good…), salted cucumbers, and other accoutrements. For the bagels, I mostly used the tried and true recipe, though I tried retarding the dough (letting it rise slowly in a cold place overnight) in both a typical 40°F fridge and a special 55°F fridge I had set up with a temperature controller for fermenting experiments. The 40° dough rose less, but then swelled up when baked (see left bagels below– perhaps I didn’t boil them long enough this time?) They still tasted good, like bagels– but the dough retarded at 55° had an especially nice crackling crust around a chewy bagel. I’ll keep playing around with rising times and temperatures… ...

I just had my first Montreal bagel (someone I know paid to have cases of them shipped overnight, from Montréal): I did appreciate the slightly smoky taste from the wood burning oven, and the variation in surface browning, but they were also a bit sweeter and lighter (less chewy) than I like, so I still prefer the New York style. I may have to try making an unholy hybrid at some point– a New York style bagel cooked over a wood fire… not quite what the gas-grill-BBQ bagels were. ...

A few photos from another round of making bagels, over Thanksgiving: [slideshow] Differences between this time and the last few times I’ve made them: I used the “6 cups all-purpose flour + 12 tsp vital wheat gluten” method of making high-gluten flour, since I didn’t have any special flour. This worked well, producing a chewy bagel. 3 tsp yeast (instead of the usual 2 1/4tsp packet), and it was mixed with a little of the malt syrup and lukewarm water a few minutes before adding it into the dough, to give it a head start, since proofing suggested this particular jar of yeast was on the old and lazy side. This seemed to work– the bagels rose slightly overnight (as expected, see the different in the 1st vs. 2nd photos) and puffed up nicely in the oven. I minced three cloves of garlic and toasted them (medium heat, dry skillet) until browned, then used them as a topping on some of them. I cooked in a different oven than normal, on a pizza stone. Unclear if this made a difference.

A brief article from Slate earlier this summer suggests that if you’re making your own bagels, the water (New York or otherwise) doesn’t really matter– it’s the combination of gluten, slow rising, and boiling before baking. Similarly, an article in The Food Lab at Slice / Serious Eats suggests the mineral level in water has no significant effect on the quality of pizza dough.

I’ve probably made bagels 25-30 times at this point, and have reached a point where they turn out surprisingly well– not the best I’ve had in New York, but better then any bagel I can buy locally. Here’s my standard recipe, based on trying a few variants (I’ve even made two different recipes and done blind taste tests with friends). It’s very similar to the one in The New Best Recipe. ...

Some typical flours and their protein percentages: Cake or pastry flour: 8-9% Generic all-purpose flour: 10.3%? King Arthur all-purpose flour: 11.7% Generic bread flour: 11.7%? King Arthur bread flour: 12.7% King Arthur whole wheat flour: 14% <-- though I believe the protein / gluten relationship in whole wheat is different, because some of this protein is in the bran yet not available to promote gluten formation. King Arthur Sir Lancelot high-gluten flour: 14.2% Bob’s Red Mill Vital Wheat Gluten: 75% Why am I posting this? Mainly because I’m about to post a bagel recipe, and having a high-protein flour really does matter for them. ...

I’ve made bagels 7 or 8 times at this point, and thought I’d settled on a recipe I liked… but cooking in a new kitchen always throws a few wrenches in the works. In this case, the oven in a vacation home rented with friends didn’t seem to want to go above 350F, while I wanted 450F… so I baked some bagels in the oven, but cooked most of them on a gas BBQ grill on the outside deck. To my surprise, that worked pretty well. ...