Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:40:31 GMT -------------- BEGIN bread-bakers.v108.n012 -------------- 001 - "Allen Cohn" Subject: Re: bagels Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 23:37:46 -0700 Hi Steve, Have no fear! Fabulous bagels can be made at home. We can probably help more if you tell us about the formula you are using. I use the one from Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice and always have great luck with it. That recipe directs you to form the bagels, cover them, and refrigerate them overnight before boiling them. With bagels (as with most bread) time = flavor. This refrigeration technique gives the bagels plenty of time. I've never tried substituting molasses for malt powder. Might work... (Diastatic) Malt powder contains enzymes that convert some of the starch into sugars...molasses just adds sugar. But I'd try to get diastatic malt powder first. Try a local beer brewing supply store, or order it online from King Arthur. Best of luck, Allen SHB San Francisco --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.2 --------------- From: "Margaret G. Cope" Subject: Bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:33:30 -0400 I have been making them successfully for the last few months using Peter Reinhart's Breadbaker's Apprentice. According to my family they are as good as the ones we buy at the Co-op an hour away. Yes, you must leave them overnight to develop flavor. I do use malt syrup in them and baking soda in the boil water., I use KA high gluten flour also available at the Co-op. Last batch I used some KA whole wheat...not alot but about a cup. I think they are not too much work for the product. If you can't find the book where you are I will scan the pages if Peter will allow and email them to you. Where are all the bread-bakers? --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.3 --------------- From: Epwerth15@aol.com Subject: Re: bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:52:50 EDT Steve, if you form the bagels, put them on greased parchment paper, cover with greased plastic wrap or Reynolds Release (ungreased), and refrigerate them at least overnight, you'll find the flavor improves greatly. You can leave them in the fridge for up to two days. Evie Werthmann --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.4 --------------- From: klzucker@aol.com Subject: Re: bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:55:08 -0400 The best bagels I have ever made are from Peter Reinhart's book - The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I can't insert the entire recipe here but he advises mixing the dough, fermenting/ raising, then forming the bagels, which then rest overnight in the refrigerator before boiling and baking. They have the best taste and texture of any I have tried. --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.5 --------------- From: "Werner Gansz" Subject: Bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:03:46 -0400 For Steve Gomes: The first question is "Do you really want the bread donuts that are sold in the bagel shops or do you want real NY Style Bagels"? The difference is enormous. NY Style bagels are dense. The crumb is a tightly woven gluten network which feels like a firm foam pillow when touched. The crust is smooth, dark and crisp. They are so dense they are difficult to pull apart. I don't know how to make bagel shop bread donuts but Rose Levy Beranbaum posted a NY Style bagel recipe here many years ago that I have been making variations of since and they are the closest thing to real bagels than any of the many recipes that I have tried. Peter Reinhart also has a bagel recipe in "Bread Baker's Apprentice" that uses a different procedure. Rose refrigerates the dough before shaping the bagel, Peter after shaping. I merged Rose's ingredients and proportions to Reinhart's procedure. I think the combination results in the best control of both flavor and that real NY bagel texture. I also made my own change in that I wanted that real dense bagel I remember from living in NY and NJ so I add some "Vital Wheat Gluten" to the already high protein King Arthur Bread Flour. Most supermarkets carry it in the baking section, usually with specialty flours. And don't forget the pepper! Bagels - Merge of Beranbaum and Reinhart Start in the afternoon. Sponge 1 tsp instant or machine yeast 3 1/4 cups KA All Purpose Flour 1/4 cup glutten 2 1/2 cups water, room temp Mix, let stand covered until doubled, 2 to 4 hours Dough 1/2 tsp instant yeast 3 1/4 cups KA All purpose flour 1/2 cup flour in reserve 1/4 cup gluten .7 oz sea salt (4 1/2 tsp - you should know how much your salt weighs) 1 Tbsp malt syrup 1 tsp finely ground fresh black pepper Optional: glaze with egg white and water mixture Mix dry ingredients, add malt syrup to sponge, add sponge to dry ingredients, mix and let hydrate, 20 mins. Knead initially by machine, finish by hand (may be too much for machine, use reserved flour to create a firm dough). There is no bulk rise (proofing). The bagels are shaped immediately. This creates the dense texture. The fermentation flavoring comes from the sponge and the overnight in the fridge. Divide into 12 4 1/2 oz pieces, shape into rounds, cover and let rest for 20 minutes. Roll each round into 8-inch ropes (use procedure for baguettes), wrap rope around hand with 2 inch overlap and ends under palms and roll to seal the ends and form the bagel. The hole should look oversize at this point. Place bagels on two cookie sheets, lined with PAM-sprayed parchment paper, 6 bagels each. Place wet paper towel under each cookie sheet, and place each sheet and towel into a food-grade plastic bag and seal, place in fridge overnight. Making room in the fridge for two cookie sheets can be a pain. I usually end up with the sheets unevenly resting on top of pickle jars. Don't rest one on top of the other without a spacer. You don't need much head room, they won't rise much. Water Bath 2 Tb malt syrup 1 Tb baking soda Preheat baking stone to 500 F. Bring large diameter pot of water to a boil. Add malt syrup and slowly, carefully add baking soda. (Baking soda will temporarily, and dramatically, intensify the boil. You will need a clean non-fuzzy towel to drain the bagels after the boil. Also a large wire-grid skimmer to handle the bagels in and out of the boiling pot is helpful here but any sieve skimmer will do. Remove one cookie sheet from the fridge, discard the wet paper towel. Use skimmer to place 3 bagels in the water bath. Flip over after one minute, remove after second minute. Place boiled bagels on towel, add next group of 3 to boiling water, flip cooked bagels on the towel over to dry other side, move them back onto parchment-lined cookie sheet, coat with egg mixture and add toppings. Flip the second batch over in the pot after one minute, remove to towel after second minute, flip to dry both sides, place on cookies sheet and coat with egg mixture and toppings. Slide bagels (on parchment paper) onto baking stone, use whatever steaming method you are comfortable with (the more steam the better), reduce oven temp to 450 F, bake 20 minutes more. Turn oven off for 5 minutes, open door for another 5 minutes. Remove to cooling racks. All ovens are different so watch the color. Dark brown is good, black is not, tan is not. If they are dark brown they are done inside. Reset oven and reheat stone to 500 F. Repeat above for second tray. --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.6 --------------- From: Mike Avery Subject: Re: Bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:08:28 -0500 Flavor in baked goods comes from many, many sources. The flour. Fermentation. The bake. Short change any of them, and you short change your product - and your taste buds. I teach classes on making New York style bagels. When we ran our bakery, people would stop me on the street saying things like, "I'm from New York and I haven't had a bagel like yours since I left New York - and I can't find many in New York to compare these days!" My bagel recipe is on my web page at http://www.sourdoughhome.com/sourdoughbagels.html I have more bagel recipes in a cookbook I sell through my web page, including a yeasted recipe. Now then... my preference is for a dense, chewy flavorful bagel with a crisp shiny crust that is bursting with flavor. If you drop one of my bagels, move your feet - the toes you save could be your own! You need to start with a high gluten flour. Bagel dough is tortured, and it takes a high gluten flour to hold up to the abuse. My favorite is GM's All-Trumps. I prefer the unbleached and unbromated version. If you want a whole wheat or rye bagel, you can add whole wheat or rye flour to the recipe, however when you get past about 25% whole wheat or rye flour, the texture of the bagel begins to suffer. I do not recommend an all whole wheat or rye bagel. You might make a nice bread, but it won't be a nice bagel. Bagel dough should be a stiff, hard to handle, dough. How stiff? A Hobart mixer is designed to give decades of service. It is not uncommon to see 30 and 40 year old Hobart mixers in heavy daily use. However, if you use a regular Hobart mixer in a bagel shop, it isn't likely to make it through a second year (unless you get one of the special Hobart's designed for pizza and bagel dough). I urge caution if you use a home mixer to mix bagel dough - you can easily burn out many home mixers with bagel dough. Also, weighing the ingredients is a very good way to get to the desired results. Measuring by cups it's too easy to add too much flour and have something too dry, or to decide that the dough shouldn't be that dry and add too much liquid. It should be quite firm, difficult to work with, but not impossibly so. After I mix the dough, I let it proof a few hours. It may not double it size because it is a very stiff dough. I form the bagels, put them on bakers parchment, cover them with saran wrap, and then let them sit at room temperature for about 1/2 an hour before covering them and putting them into the fridge. This time is called "floor time" in the trade, and it is necessary to let the bagels rise in the fridge. How long your floor time should be depends on how cold your refrigerator is and how long you will leave the bagels retard in your fridge. Half an hour is NOT enough time to let the bagels develop. I retarded them overnight before boiling and baking. Is boiling necessary? If you are making donuts, no. If you are making bagels, yes. It it ain't boiled, it ain't a bagel. In addition to the malt in the dough, you need to add some malt to the water you boil the bagels in, as this gives the bagels crust the shine one likes to see on a bagel. In the morning, I start by pre-heating the oven to 500F. It takes a hot oven to bake bagels, and it takes a while for the oven to get hot. I peel the bagels off the bakers parchment and drop them into boiling water that's had some malt extract added to it. A few times, I've had the bagels stick to the parchment paper. The easy answer is to drop the bagels, still on the parchment paper, into the boiling water. The bagels and parchment paper separate very quickly then. When you put the bagels into the boiling water, they should sink and then float within 5 to 15 seconds. If they float right away, the bagels were over proofed. If they don't float, or don't float soon enough, they weren't proofed enough. Let the bagels sit at room temperature for an hour or so, then try boiling them again. In the bakery, we kept our retarder at around 45 to 48F. This is considerably warmer than a home refrigerator, but it worked very well. You may want to let your bagels get more floor time the next time you make them. My goal was to be able to take the bagels out of the fridge and boil them right away. It's easy to overdo boiling the bagels. I like to give them about 2 minutes, 1 minute per side. If you boil them too long, they will over-extend and look like your fingers used to look when mom let you stay in the bathtub too long - pruny. When the bagels come out of the boil, it's time to dip them in any seeds you might want to top them with. The stickiness of the malt will help keep the seeds on the bagels. I like to bake the bagels as soon as I can after they are boiled. Bake time and temperature are also critical. You need a hot oven to bake bagels. About 15 minutes at 500F is a good starting point. Don't be afraid rt0 You want some real color to the crust. Professor Calvel used to say you can't burn bread. He encouraged people to experiment by baking each batch 5 minutes longer than the previous one until the bread was too done. I can testify that you can burn bread. But I can also testify that most bakers in the USA are so frightened of the possibility of burning bread that they chronically underbake their breads. Somewhere between 75 and 90% of the flavor of bread is in the crust, and if the bread isn't baked enough, that flavor is lost. Steaming the bagels helps their crust a lot. However, too much steam will impair the crust's taste formation. Let it have steam the first 2 or 3 minutes of the bake. Please check out the on-line recipe and give it a whirl. I hope these hints help. Mike Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com part time baker http://www.sourdoughhome.com networking guru Skype mavery81230 wordsmith A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day: Egyptian back doctors are cairopractors. --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.7 --------------- From: "Mary J. Stackhouse" Subject: bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 10:44:14 -0400 I have used Peter Reinhart's bagel recipe from 'The Bread Baker's Apprentice' with great success. I use a stand mixer and the dough is very stiff and is difficult to mix. The bagels are shaped and refrigerated overnight. They are not like the bagels that you get in a bagel bakery, but I love them. Mary J. Stackhouse --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.8 --------------- From: "Bonni Brown" Subject: Ah...thoughts of bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:19:22 -0400 In response to Steve's outcry for bagel therapy may I suggest you check out Nancy Silverton's recipe in Breads from The La Brea Bakery (easily found in libraries or bookstores). I'm originally from Brooklyn where we had local bagel/bialy bakeries in the neighborhood between other little storefront businesses. After leaving NYC in 1990 I too suffered from lack of credible bagels. The closest I've ever produced were Nancy's bagels, which rose slowly overnight in the refrigerator before plunging into the bath and bake. They have a depth of flavor and chewiness that is often lacking in the commercial mass produced versions found around here (FL). Try it, you'll like it. Bonni Bonni Bakes Edible Art in the Village of the Arts 930 12th Street West Bradenton, FL 34205 941.746.6647 --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.9 --------------- From: debunix Subject: Re: bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:23:03 -0700 Which are the bagels like that you are trying to replicate? Big, light bagels are easier to duplicate than firm, small, dense ones in my experience, because I couldn't work fast enough to keep them from rising while I was shaping and boiling them. --diane in los angeles http://www.well.com/user/debunix/recipes/WholeBaking.html http://www.well.com/user/debunix/recipes/FoodPages.html --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.10 --------------- From: "nancihank" Subject: Re: Digest bread-bakers.v108.n011 Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:33:14 -0500 I ground and baked rolls with some of my new hard white wheat from Farmer's Direct Foods. I could tell absolutely no difference between it and the Golden 86 hard white wheat from Walton's Feed. I could also not tell any difference in the look of the grain or the taste when I just chewed some of the grain. So....that makes me extremely glad we bought it. It is interesting to see a wheat grower's perspective on wheat prices. Nancy C. East Texas --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.11 --------------- From: "Vickilynn H" Subject: Steve- Bagels Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:15:11 -0400 Hi Steve, Making homemade bagels is absolutely fabulous! First off, you need a REAL recipe. The best one I have ever used is by Peter Reinhart from his book *"The Bread Baker's Apprentice." I make recipe often, only I made it 100% whole-grain. You can see my variation of Peter's recipe on my blog (address below) and scroll down to the bagel recipe. And no, molasses isn't quite the same as malt.It is a passable substitute, but if you really want bagel flavor, use the malt (I use Eden organic malt syrup). ~~In Messiah Yeshua, Vickilynn Haycraft Micah 6:8 http://www.realfoodliving.com BLOG: http://www.realfoodliving.wordpress.com ORDER "Wrapping It Up!" http://www.llumina.com/store/wrappingitup.htm --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.12 --------------- From: "Sherwood" Subject: Bagels Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:27:57 -0400 I used to make bagels all the time, but got out of the habit. Maybe I'll try again. Anyway, here's my recipe, with variations: Bread Machine Bagels 4 teaspoons active dry yeast 4 cups bread flour 2 teaspoons salt 2 1/2 tablespoons granulated sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons brown sugar 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons water Add all ingredients to bread machine, process on dough cycle. When machine is done, remove dough and place on a lightly floured surface. Cover with a clean kitchen cloth and let rest for 5 minutes. Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces. Shape each piece of dough into a 10-inch long rope. Form each rope into a circle, overlap the ends slightly and pinch together. Cover shaped bagels with a clean kitchen cloth and let rest for 10 minutes. Bring 3 quarts of water to a boil in a large sauce pan. Stir in 1 tablespoon of brown sugar. Carefully drop the bagels into the boiling water. Let sit for 20 seconds, turn, then 30 seconds more. Remove with a slotted spoon. Put on a baking sheet which has been sprayed with Pam. Bake in a 375 F preheated oven for 20 minutes. Turn over onto pizza stone and bake for an additional 5 minutes, or until golden brown. Raisin-Cinnamon Bagels: Add 2 teaspoons cinnamon and 2/3 cup raisins. Adjust to your taste. Apple-Cinnamon Bagels: Add 2 teaspoons cinnamon and 2/3 cup dried chopped apples. Blueberry, Cranberry or Cherry Bagels: Add 2/3 cup dried blueberries, cranberries or cherries. If desired, add 1/2 teaspoon almond extract. --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.13 --------------- From: "Richard Young" Subject: Winter Wheat Supplies Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:18:25 -0500 Regarding the wheat situation and comments about winter wheat specifically - recent flooded fields of winter wheat in Arkansas and Missouri will lower anticipated supplies according to Little Rock TV station KTHV. As information. Dick Young redfox@suddenlink.net --------------- MESSAGE bread-bakers.v108.n012.14 --------------- From: Jeff Dwork Subject: new web site Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:23:10 -0700 We recently received an announcement from of a new web site devoted to bread-baking. Jeff >Hello: I am writing to as an amateur baker because I have just >started a video sharing site that is dedicated to amateur home >bakers and that I hope you will consider contributing to. The site >is called www.uKnead.com > >I started uKnead.com because I love baking and have been able to >learn so much from the internet. YouTube is a wonderful resource for >videos of all kinds, but I have found that often, search results for >baking include things that are not "on point" or not appropriate at all. > >Uknead.com will be dedicated solely to baking, and I will try and >screen out all irrelevant or off-topic videos before they appear. >While www.uKnead.com is now programmed and functioning, it will >likely be several days before a significant amount of content is >posted. I do hope that, in a short while, uknead.com will be a >vibrant site for the baking community to share videos/pictures, >comments and questions. --------------- END bread-bakers.v108.n012 --------------- Copyright (c) 1996-2008 Regina Dwork and Jeffrey Dwork All Rights Reserved