Goodreads Bookshelf
Time to make the bagels...
Lauren's been on a bagel kick for a few weeks now, not necessarily eating them every morning, but pretty often. I've enjoyed a bagel some mornings myself. For most of this kick, I've been thinking about making bagels from scratch. Over the weekend, I finally made an attempt at these, once again following the recipe in The Bread-Baker's Apprentice. The recipe proved to be a bit challenging at times.
First, I didn't have all the ingredients, exactly. No high-gluten flour, so I had to use bread flour. No malt powder or malt syrup, so I used dark brown sugar. Then there's the recipe itself, which begins with a soaker, mixing some of the flour, some of the yeast, and all of the water, and letting it sit for a few hours. With the proportions, it seemed a bit thicker than what the directions indicated, and when it came time to mix in the rest of the ingredients... well, it was tough because the soaker was so thick. Trying to do it with the mixer, it tossed flour all over my counter, even with the splash guard put on the bowl. A spoon was pretty much useless too, so I ended up working it in with my hands.
For some reason, the dough didn't seem to work well with my dough hook, so I also found myself kneading it by hand. The dough was fairly stiff, so I had to leave it to rest several times. Like many of the recipes in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, this recipe calls for retarding the dough's rise by putting it in the fridge overnight. I'm sure it's great for the dough, but it's kind of a pain to find space in the fridge for what turned out to be three baking sheets of bagels--and could easily have been four if I'd made them smaller, as I'd like to in the future.
Fortunately for these bagels, they were some of the best bagels I've ever eaten. Seriously. I hadn't realized how crappy the bagged "bagels" that we've been getting are until I ate these bagels. Wow.
When I posted on Facebook about my bagels, one of my friends from college pointed me to this article from Slate.com, "Scratch That: How cost-effective is it to make homemade pantry staples?" The first "staple" on writer Jennifer Reese's list was bagels, which turn out to be a good value, besides being a huge step above store-bought. The recipe she cites looks a lot easier, so I'll at least give it a try the next time around, though I may try to bring in a thing or two from the other recipe and see how that goes. Here, though, is the result of my work on Saturday and Sunday:
The darker ones were cooked by themselves, while the others had to take turns on top while cooking. Also, in the background, you can see some of the applesauce we canned.