Week 20: The Joy of Bagels

These bagels were made on May 15.

This week’s bagel kicks off a journey into some odd territory: recipes not from bread books, nor from bagel books, but from what I will call Standard Cookbooks of the American Midwest. It’s from Joy of Cooking, which is not a cookbook I knew when I was growing up. But after I got married and figured it was time to learn how to cook, I started looking around at upscale cookbooks. Most of their authors eventually referenced Joy, so I bought my own copy (before the revised edition that came out around 1998). It certainly is a comprehensive labor of love, and it covers most anything you would need to make in a kitchen, from cocktails to chocolate cake and any kind of meat in between. It contains no superfluous illustrations, so the introductory paragraphs for the recipes and the sections stand out a bit more, especially when they contain amusing anecdotes.

Joy of Cooking is a classic, and a handy book, but should you turn to it to learn how to make a bagel? Well, the jury’s still out.

This recipe looked a bit odd from the start: the first four ingredients were scalded milk, butter, sugar, and salt. Son One was helping out with the bagel prep this time. He eyed the saucepan and asked pointedly, “Why are you heating up milk?”

Well, because the recipe says so, that’s why. This weekend we’re following the recipe as closely as we can and hoping that we don’t end up like a trusting elderly couple who follow the voice of their GPS unit and drive straight into a lake. Scald milk? Sure! Add butter? If you say so! Son One commented, “It smells like we’re making macaroni and cheese.”

The next step was to add a packet of yeast to the warm milk mixture. The milk was hotter than the recommended temperature range when I took it off the stove, but adding the butter cooled it to below the range. No matter — I just let the yeast hang out there a little longer and keep developing.

Actually, after adding two eggs and a few cups of flour to the batter I had, it all developed into a picture-perfect bread dough that was wonderful to knead for ten minutes. A few sprinklings of flour — unbleached all-purpose in this case — were all that was needed to rid it of stickiness.

Next, the dough was left to rise, covered, until it had doubled in size. I didn’t know how long that would take, and I was dividing my time between bagels and watching qualifying sessions for the Spanish Grand Prix, so I set a timer for 30 minutes since that was the typical rest time for the other bagel recipes.

At the end of thirty minutes’ time, I hopped back into the kitchen…to discover that I had a nicely developed ball of dough to work with, and that I had completely neglected to start the water boiling. I got the water going, checked the recipe, and noticed that the formed bagels were supposed to rest for fifteen minutes before hitting the water. That was plenty of time for the water to come to the boil, right?

Well, it wasn’t, actually, but I don’t think it did the bagels much harm to wait a bit longer (even if they weren’t technically bagels yet). Anyway, the recipe said that I would be making 18 bagels from this dough. While 18 is a special number indeed, it’s not easy for me to bake 18 bagels, as two half-sheet pans won’t fit in my oven, and staggering the baking sheets and switching racks forces me to open the oven more often than I’d like during the baking time, losing a lot of the valuable 400°F heat and doing goodness knows what to the texture of the bagels.

Plus, how do you divide dough into 18 equal portions? Without a great deal more experience and a very good scale — and my scale recently went to scale heaven (Toledo, Ohio?) — I can’t. But here’s how I tried to make 16 equal portions:

Ah, fractions. Is there anything they can’t do?

The bagels rose for a while as the water in my stock pot came up to the boil. When that water, supplemented with a tablespoon of sugar, was ready, it was really ready.

I slipped bagels in two at a time, then flipped them and slipped in two more. After three minutes had passed, I took the first set out, flipped the second set, and put two more bagels in the water. They plumped up very well except for a straggler that will be obvious in a later photo.

Fitting all the bagels on a single sheet was a bit of a challenge. Thank goodness I spent what seemed like years of my college “career” playing Tetris on an IBM PC. Quick, quick, the boss is coming!

 

I baked the bagels for 25 minutes, the high end of the time the recipe suggested. In the end they looked a little fluffy, and that may have been because they were so close together that they steamed themselves. They only developed a crispy crust right on their tops. Really, I didn’t give them anywhere else to go.

While the recipe was fairly easy to follow, the ingredients were easy to find, and the dough was exceptionally easy to work with, these bagels were evidence that taking the “easy” way doesn’t really produce what I would call a bagel of character. The texture was fluffy rather than chewy, the all-purpose flour didn’t provide much flavor (even with the inclusion of two eggs in the dough), and there was nothing special about them in general.

On the other hand, I took most of them to work and they were soon gobbled up. Nobody complained. If you make the perfect bagel and nobody eats it, is it still a bagel?

Doctor Strangegrain: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cheese

It all started a few weeks ago, when I opened my mailbox to find…a box. Inside was a collection of items I’d known was coming, but for which I was still somewhat unprepared. In the box was a white cotton towel, a sheaf of photocopies held together with a small binder clip and a sandwich-sized Ziploc bag holding what looked like an alarmingly large clump of ear wax.

They were, in fact, kefir grains, and the photocopies were pages from The Art of Natural Cheesemaking: the directions for waking these dormant grains so they would produce a fermented beverage — and, eventually, cheese.

I had my friend George to thank for this. (He has someone else to thank in turn, but he can do that on his own blog if he wishes.) He had some of these grains for a while, started feeding them, and soon he was making kefir milk (actually, the milk is what is called kefir) and then somehow hanging and draining and salting it and turning it into cheese. I must have sounded pretty enthusiastic about his activities, because soon I was informed that my very own SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast) would be in the mail.

(n.b.: The term SCOBY naturally made us think of Scooby-Doo, being from “Generation SuperFriends” as we are, but nicknaming the grains Scooby struck us both as being somewhat too much of an obvious joke. So we went with Fred instead, with the consequence that George’s SCOBY is named Fred and mine is Fred Jr. If you’re of our generation, you may share the absurdity of the possibility of a Fred Jr., which underscores the lighthearted character of the entire home-cheesemaking enterprise.)

I received my “cheesemaking kit” on February 1, and decided that I would feed my kefir grains with whole milk, which just seemed right even though it was not required. (Apparently they’ll be happy to be fed with any kind of milk — even skim milk, which many people don’t consider to be any real kind of milk.) Raw milk might have been better, but I don’t have a source for that (more properly, I haven’t tried to find a source for raw milk, though one may well be within walking distance) so I decided to start with whole milk.

Then the milk sat, unopened, in my fridge for so long that its “sell by” date came and went. Reluctantly I decided to get rid of that milk, buy a fresh half-gallon, take a deep breath, and start Fred Jr. on his lactose-exclusive diet.

Feeding Fred Jr. turned out to be pretty easy. I’m someone who can really fret over the details when something’s at stake, but this really sounded like a low-risk proposition:

1. Place kefir grains in a jar.
2. Pour any kind of milk over the kefir grains.
3. Put a lid on the jar and leave it alone at room temperature for 24 hours.
4. Check on the kefir; when it’s “ready,”strain out the milk, drink the milk, and repeat from Step 2.

After the first 24 hours, I drank the milk and didn’t find the taste very strong. It was odd, though; I texted George to inquire as to whether or not the first batch of kefir usually tasted like feet.

The second day, there wasn’t much difference in the milk. It still tasted, basically, like warm milk that had gone just a bit off course. The room temperature is kind of low, I thought. It could just be that the fermentation process will have to take more time — maybe 36 hours instead of 24. That evening I forgot to strain the milk from the grains and re-feed them. When I checked the kefir the next morning, I found that it had, truly, become something else. It was fizzy, a sort of naturally carbonated milk.

So I fed Fred Jr. again, giving his jar a little shake whenever he seemed to be getting too complacent. That’s fine, boy, fizz up, I’m on to you now and I’ve figured out your schedule. Maybe someday we’ll make cheese together, but for now I’ll keep drinking the milk.

This afternoon I took another look at the jar.

I texted George: My next kefir batch appears to have gone mad.
He replied: Go ahead and hang it to dry for a day.

I took another look at the sheaf of photocopies. How hard could this be? What would I have to do, and when would I have to do it? The answers seemed to be, somewhat disconcertingly for me, not much and whenever. Here I wanted to know the details of a structured, scientific plan, and my instructions were just to put the yogurty goop into the cloth and hang it from a wooden spoon until the liquids finally dripped out. Who was running the homemade cheese franchise anyway? A bunch of reckless hippies?

Oh, yeah.

So, tonight I’m trying not to look at my little formerly-filled-with-pasta-sauce glass jar because I might not be ready for the level of coagulation I’ll have to face. But in the morning I might have to come to terms with the fact that I might be on my way to making the cream cheese that will go with my bagels.

Please, if you are thinking of mailing me a mated pair of salmon so I can breed them in the bathtub and start making my own lox — please don’t. Please don’t.

I only have one bathtub.