Bagels!

There are few things more delicious than a warm chewy bagel topped with a thick slathering of tangy cream cheese. On the other hand, there are few things more disappointing than biting into a dry, puffy donut shaped bread product masquerading as a bagel. Unfortunately, even in Berkeley, home of the snobbiest of food snobs, we find many more of the later than the former. You can track down a few true bagels, but my modest student salary does not permit those luxuries on a daily basis. So I was delighted to find a “bagel recipe for the ages” in my new “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice” book by Peter Reinhart. The Bread Baker’s Apprentice is not so much a cookbook as a guide to bread making. It reads like a good text book, desiring to give the reader the tools to understand the process by teaching its fundamentals. He first explains the chemistry of bread making from flour choice to baking methods and then presents a large number of different types of bread as formulas rather than recipes. With this information in hand the aspiring baker can correct her mistakes and eventually improvise.

The bagel recipe is a labor of love, but manageable for beginners like myself. It doesn’t take an entire day, rather it requires you to make and shape the dough in the evening and then let it sit overnight in the fridge to let the flavors to develop before boiling and baking them in the morning. The result is immensely gratifying.



I found the recipe transcribed on another blog. I don’t really know the ethics of posting someone else’s recipe on your website, but I would guess if you acknowledge the creator it’s probably ok. If you are at all interested in bread baking I would highly recommend this book; there is no substitute for the wealth of information it contains. My additional comments to what is posted on the blog are:

1. Big bagels are awesome, I don’t know why she wants them smaller.
2. I’ve used brown sugar instead of malt and it has worked well.
3. The dough is too stiff to use in my stand mixer without significantly degrading its lifetime, so I do most of the kneading by hand.
4. It takes me much longer than 10 minutes to do the kneading. You can judge when you are finished by seeing if the dough passes the “window pane” test which Reinhart describes in his book. You cut off a small piece of dough, hold it up to the light and stretch it until it is paper thin. If it does not tear you are ready to move on to the dividing and shaping. He also specifies that the dough have a satiny feel to it and not be tacky or sticky. Satiny is very important. It takes time to achieve so be patient. You will know satiny when you feel it.
5. The pastry scraper is an indispensable tool. It makes dividing and cleaning much much easier.

**Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been a New Yorker. Therefore I am not liable for failure to reach their impossible standards.