Glenn,
A noble quest. I'm with you, I'd love to find a decent recipe. But first,
yes bialys are a Jewish bread, coming originally from Bialystock
Poland. They are sold in many bagel shops but unfortunately, since their
composition is very different from bagels, and since I think the vast
majority of people have never tasted the real thing, they're uniformly bad,
fake, inauthentic and wrong. What bagel shops do, I imagine, is take bagel
dough, which is dry, flatten it into a disk, poke a depression in the
center, add the onion filling, (more about that later), and bake it,
(unlike bagels, skipping the boiling step). No good.
It's been years since I've had a great bialy. I've had OK ones from a bialy
shop on NYC's lower east side and packaged ones from Brooklyn NY available
in my NJ supermarket. I've tried every printed bialy recipe I've come
across and
they're all wrong in my opinion. This includes (I believe) books by George
Greenstein, Joan Nathan, Mimi Sheraton and Bernard Clayton. Of the four or
five I've tried only one (I can't remember who) got the filling right, as
far as mixing bread crumbs with finely minced onion. This is apparently a
secret.
My wife made a brilliant observation when she remarked on the similarity
between the crumb and texture of bialys and that of my ciabatta, an Italian
bread which is so wet that it's difficult or impossible to knead by
hand. I think you're right, Glenn, about it being more like pizza crust
which is also a pretty wet dough. That's why bialys always have a flour
coating on them -- they're so wet they can only be handled by first dumping
them into flour. (Of course!) I've tried several times to make bialys by
interpolating the two recipes but the best I've gotten is OK-ish, clearly
not good enough.
So, there's some ingredient or technique involved in bialys which I don't
know. The people who print the recipes don't know either, and I suspect the
people who did know are probably dead or retired and not talking.
Mark Judman <Mark_Judman@colpal.com>
Glenn in Den wrote:
>There is a recipe that I've been having an unusual amount of difficulty
>finding. They are called BIALYS (pronounced bee-ah-lee). I may be off on
>the spelling. I think they are Jewish. They are in most NYC bagel stores
>that do their own baking. They are the size of a bagel except there is no
>hole. The center is pressed flat and some onion and/or garlic and other
>spices are sprinkled in the center. The dough seems more like pizza crust
>than like a bagel.
>If anyone has the recipe, could you please post it? I doubt it would be a
>bread machine recipe (except of course to use the dough cycle).