Bagels at Home

Finished Bagels - Front: Plain - Rear: Asiago cheese

Ok, so I don't live in NYC, or anywhere near there. I've never had a "real" New York bagel. However, I can sure tell you that those things you get in the plastic bag at the grocery store in the refrigerator section that are called bagels, aren't.

I've tried several times to produce a good bagel following various recipes I've found, and usually I've been pretty disappointed. The resulting bagel is either too soft, too dry, too yeasty, or too lumpy. Finally I gave in and tried Peter Reinhart's recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I've tried it before with mixed luck, but this time things turned out great. I'm not entirely sure what the difference was this time; perhaps I just was in the right frame of mind to get it right.

The key here seems to be really working the flour into the dough, working in at least two stages, and thoroughly kneading the dough (I didn't really knead enough this time... I promise I'll do more next time!). This is at least an 8-hour process, although most of it is spent just allowing the dough to do its thing.

Classic Bagels

Ingredients for Sponge

1 tsp instant yeast
4 cups bread flour
2 1/2 cups water

Instructions for Sponge

Mix together the yeast and flour, add the water, and stir until smooth. Then let this sit, covered, for about 3 hours. The mixture should be quite bubbly at this point.

Ingredients

1/2 tsp instant yeast
3 1/2 cups bread flour
1 Tbsp salt
2 tsp dry malt extract (or substitute any sugar)

Instructions for Dough

Add the additional yeast, 3 cups of flour, salt, and sugar. I used dry barley malt extract that I have available from my home brewing adventures, but I think any sugar would do the trick here. The idea is that the sugar helps to caramelize and give a nice brown color to the bagel as it bakes. I used my KitchenAid mixer to work the additional ingredients in. It's really a little overloaded for the advertised capacity of the mixer (six cups flour), as well as being a stiff dough, so I just mixed until the flour was incorporated and then went to knead on the counter with the remaining flour. Knead until completely smooth (I only kneaded for a couple minutes, and I regret that. I should have done at least five or six).

Divide the kneaded dough into 12 pieces, place on oiled parchment paper (I have these wonderful re-usable teflon sheets that I use instead), and cover. Allow the dough to rise an additional half hour. At this point you're ready to shape the dough.

Shaping the Dough

The easiest way to shape the dough is to roll the divided pieces into a ball, and then push your finger right through the center. Then work the dough around your finger until it resembles a ring. After you've shaped the bagels, put them back on the parchment paper and cover again. At this point you can either refrigerate for up to 24 hours, or just continue to let them rise for another three or four hours. You want to make sure they don't over-rise, or they will deflate when you boil them. I think this is unlikely if you make sure you have kneaded the dough enough, and put in enough flour.

Boiling and Baking

Finally comes the interesting and fun part - turning these lumps of dough into a bagel. Preheat your oven to 500 degrees, and start a large pot of water to boil. Once the water is boiling, add about a tablespoon of baking soda. This addition of a base gives the outer crust of the bagel a distinctive flavor - soft pretzels are a similar process but I think usually use a more concentrated amount of baking soda. You'll want the water to be boiling pretty vigorously and a large amount of water so the temperature doesn't drop too much when you add the bagels. Carefully lift the bagels off of the parchment and lower them into the water with a slotted spoon. They should float quickly. Allow them to boil for one minute, then turn to the other side and boil for another minute. Return them to the parchment paper. You can add seeds or other toppings immediately after boiling.

Boiling the bagels

Once you've boiled all of the bagels, it's time to put them in the oven. Bake for five minutes, reduce your temperature to 450 degrees and rotate your baking pans to ensure a more even baking process. After another 5 minutes, the bagels should be fully baked - now just keep an eye on them and bake until they're as brown as you desire. For me that was another five or six minutes, for total baking time of about 15 minutes. Cool on a wire rack and enjoy!

Baking with spent grains: Peasant Loaf

My previous post described a quick bread recipe using some spent grains leftover from beer brewing.  Here's a slightly more involved recipe for a slow-rise bread that also incorporates spent grains.

I've been doing a lot of slower rise yeast breads over the past few years.  The concepts that Jim Lahey pioneered with his no-knead baking techniques are really remarkable.  This recipe doesn't slow things down that much, and I don't bake in a closed container.  It is actually a fairly traditional standard bread recipe with the yeast reduced for a slower rise to help develop flavor.

Slow Rise Spent Grain Peasant Loaf

Ingredients

2 cups wet spent grain
3.5 cups bread flour
1 cup water
1 tbsp salt
1 tsp dry yeast

Preparation

Mix all ingredients until you have a fairly homogeneous dough. You may need to add a little more flour or water depending on how wet your spent grain is. This should be a fairly soft, wet dough that pulls away from the side of the bowl if you add a little more flour to the surface. Cover the dough and let it rise at room temperature for about 6 hours, until doubled in size. Punch the dough down and shape into 2 round loaves, and let rise for another 2-3 hours or until nearly doubled. Slash the tops of the loaves and bake in a preheated 425 degree oven for about 35 minutes. I pour a couple cups of boiling water into a roasting pan on the floor of the oven right after I put the bread in - this steam helps the bread rise nicely in the oven and develop a good crust.

Baking with spent grains: Boston Brown Bread

I've been doing some beer brewing recently - in the past I've had ok luck using malt extracts, both dry or liquid.  But this Christmas I got a partial-mash kit as a gift, so I thought I'd give it a try.  Pretty simple to do, but in the end I wound up with about 4 cups of spent grains - crushed, malted, roasted barley.  It seems like a waste to throw out this stuff, even though it has served its purpose for the beer.  So I did a little research into what could be done with these spent grains, and came up with a lot of very vague ideas and recipes, but nothing real concrete.  Many of the recipes out there use just a small amount of the spent grains, so I thought I'd try out something that uses a more significant volume.  Bread seems like the obvious choice to start with, since you can throw almost anything into a bread dough and it will turn out fine.

Spent grains from brewing

The natural sweetness of the spent grain combined with the rich flavors of the darker roasted barley (I had a Scottish ale kit that included lots of chocolate malt and roasted barley) pointed me towards a dark heavy bread, and the natural quick bread that fits that bill is Boston brown bread.  Mark Bittmann's excellent How to Cook Everything has a good recipe for this; I just reduced the liquid a bit to compensate for the very wet grain, and made two 9x5 loaves:

Boston Brown Bread using Spent Brewing Grains

Ingredients

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup corn meal
2 cups spent grain (wet)
2 cups milk
4 tbsp vinegar
1 tbsp salt
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup dark molasses
3/4 cup corn syrup

Preparation

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Grease two 9x5 inch bread pans. Combine milk and vinegar and let sit while mixing dry ingredients. This will provide an acidic base to help with leavening the bread. You could use buttermilk instead of the milk and vinegar - I've had good luck with buttermilk powder as well (you can find this in the baking aisle of most grocery stores if you look carefully). Then add the spent grain and sweeteners (I used half corn syrup because I ran out of molasses). You will wind up with a fairly thin batter, but it will firm up as it bakes. Bake for about 70 minutes, and then allow to cool for a few minutes before removing from the pans.

This is great served with beans or spread with cream cheese - or just eaten straight with butter.

Boston Brown Bread