Buck up, bub.
Here’s something you don’t see every day, a newspaper article on how good life is: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121331500809069989.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries. Now back to the floods, war and famine…
READ ONAuthor: joepastry
So then, how did I do?
Well if you scroll down and compare these shots to the ones in the post Intro to the Cement Doughnut you’ll see that I didn’t do half bad. True, where the crust is concerned, I don’t have the nice smooth skin and near perfect ring-shape of the Manhattan original, but I do have deeper caramelization […]
READ ONWhy do you put sugar and other stuff in bagel water?
I’ve talked about the why’s of bagel boiling, but didn’t address all the additives that can, and often do, go into the boiling pot. Everything from sugar to malt syrup to baking soda to lye are used as additives, all of which have the effect of creating a darker, crispier crust. Why darker? Because sugars […]
READ ONBig holes, little holes.
Got a question last evening from a reader by the name of Dan, who asked: If high gluten flour is what helps give breads bigger holes, why do you use high gluten in bagels where the ideal is smaller holes? That’s an excellent question, for in truth the idea of making bagels with high-gluten flour […]
READ ONHow to Make Bagels
I don’t think I’ve ever made a bagel that’s a flawless torus, but nobody’s perfect. They’re crunchy, chewy, deep brown and taste great with cream cheese, which is all you need to get into bagel-maker heaven when you die. As I’ve mentioned previously, there are a lot of bagel dough recipes out there, and when […]
READ ONBig Brown Busts Out
Don’t know how many of you tuned in for the Belmont Stakes yesterday, but the big story there was that Big Brown not only lost the Belmont Stakes, his jockey Kent Desormeaux declined to run him anywhere near his capacity for the last quarter mile or so. He simply eased him out of contention in […]
READ ONSomething else to chew over
Seems the blog drew all sorts of expertise over the weekend, including this comment from a Brazilian linguist by the name of Angela (who also happens to be a bagel enthusiast): I’ve just read your post on the (possible) origins of the word ‘bagel’. Just so it happens I baked bagels today (no malt syrup […]
READ ONSome much needed validation
Those of you who’ve been reading me long enough to remember my posts on southern biscuits know that I’ve always felt a little defensive on that topic. I have, after all, spent almost all of my life up north. Who am I to move south and start telling people what to do? Happily over the […]
READ ONWhat is High-Gluten Flour?
For that matter, what’s gluten? The next time you make a batch of bread or pizza dough, pinch off a little bit and work it between your fingers under the kitchen faucet for a minute. A good proportion of the dough, mostly water-soluble starch, will wash away. Yet a small rubbery ball will remain. That’s […]
READ ONWhy are Bagels Boiled?
There’s sense in which the ritual of boiling bagels is just that: a ritual. As I mentioned yesterday, the practice of briefly boiling, then baking, small breads goes back millennia. For some, notably a bevy of commercial bagel makers off the East coast, boiling is a self-defeating spring-inhibiting anachronism. Yet true bagel lovers know that […]
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