Constantly exploring career alternatives, I have baked 4 batches of bagels this month. Here are a few bagel-making tips.
- it is not necessary to boil bagels prior to baking. But if you don’t, your bagels will suck, and people will laugh at you.
- when overnighting shaped bagels, packing them in edge-to-edge on a sheet pan results (the next morning) in a single coagulated 12x17-inch matrix of perforated dough, not unlike those plastic 6-pack holders (except much larger, and not made of petroleum products).
- shaped raw dough cannot be easily removed from parchment paper. Such bagels need to be peeled off the paper, which stretches the bagel shape into a flaccid loop about seven inches across. Once again: people will laugh at you.
I, of course, didn’t make any of these mistakes. I point them out merely as a public service.
Peter Reinhart’s sourdough bagel recipe (from Crust & Crumb) is excellent, and provides a great base for a variety of bagel types: pumpkin seed, sesame seed, cinnamon, chocolate, whitefish, WD-40, or iron filings.
(OK, just kidding about the whitefish.)
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posted to channel: Bread
updated: 2005-03-01 13:58:18
