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.