A New York weekend

Two of my favorite "New York" foods are pizza and bagels. Joe has blogged about our pizza making attempts, and we're getting closer to making great pizza, but the crust still isn't quite right. With that almost success under our belts, I set out to learn how to make bagels. Joe, who grew up in New York, has a much more refined bagel palette than I do, but my lower standards mean that I'm often more satisfied with my bagels. I think he had his doubts about homemade bagels, but that just made me more determined to try it.

First, I did a lot of reading up on various homemade bagels. I settled on this recipe, which takes two days to make, but most of that time is inactive while your bagels hang out in the fridge. I liked this recipe because I had all the ingredients on hand and it has a longer fermentation period which helps the bagels develop more flavor. Also, it required much less kneading than other recipes, which is always a plus for me, since I do all my breadmaking by hand. In case you decide to make this recipe, I just used honey instead of the barley malt syrup.

Then I made the dough. It took about 15 minutes, then it went in the fridge for a couple hours. Then I got to take the dough out of the fridge and shape it into bagels. There are two methods I've read about for shaping the bagels: divide the dough, roll each piece into a ball, then poke a hole in the middle; or divide the dough, roll it into a rope and then wrap the rope around your hand. I chose the rope method. It required putting a little bit of water on the dough to seal it together. These bagels went back into the fridge and stayed there overnight.

I took the bagels out this morning to do the old boil and bake. They had to come to room temperature for about 90 minutes, then they went into the pot. This was my favorite part of the whole process.
Then they went into the oven and baked for about 16 minutes. I flipped them over a little more than halfway through. If you want to add toppings to your bagels, you do so after you boil them and before you bake them. I tried making a couple of salt bagels for Joe, but with kosher salt instead of sea salt or pretzel salt, since it was all we had on hand.
Mmmmmmm, bagels.
See, they even look like bagels!

Joe said the bagels are "good, but maybe they could be chewier. I thought the outside crust was good." Those of you who know Joe know that this is a glowing review, and I do agree with him about the chewier part. Overall, this recipe was easy to make, and it's sure to impress anyone when you tell them that you made the bagels.

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

Today I decided to switch things up with my bread making and try to make cinnamon swirl bread. The recipe I found was on this blog. The dough turned out to be a lot stickier than other bread that I've made, and it left me with with some unpleasant bread dough dingleberries between my fingers after I was kneading the dough. The bread rose more than others that I've made, but I think I used more yeast than the recipe called for. I need to work on my yeast conversion skills, between packets and out of a jar, or maybe it's all just the same. Alton Brown should do a show on bread baking.

Anyway, once the dough was done rising the first time, I spread a little melted butter on the dough, then sprinkled on a bunch of sugar and cinnamon. I added a little bit of brown sugar to the mix too, because I like it.

The instructions said to bake this loaf at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. I started to become a little suspicious of the recipe at this point, but I'd already made the dough. Normally, bread bakes for about 35 minutes at 350 degrees, at least in my kitchen, with the recipes I've been using. Sure enough, I read a few reviews of the recipe, and one person found the inside of the loaf to be raw and gooey. Reasons for that could be that the person used too much butter, or let it rise too long. I wound up baking it for about 35 or 40 minutes, and I tested for doneness with a thermometer (generally a loaf of bread baked in a loaf pan is done at about 190 degrees F).

This is what it looked like when it was finished:

Although it looks pretty delicious, I don't recommend this recipe, and I wouldn't make it again. I've made this bread the last couple times I baked bread, and I found it to be a much tastier recipe than the current one. The cinnamon swirl part tasted fine, but the bread itself was flavorless and not really worth eating. I'm thinking it might have something to do with the lack of butter/milk/oil (i.e., fat, a.k.a. flavor) in the recipe. In the future, I might try to make the regular white bread and swirl in the cinnamon. Or maybe I'll just try wheat bread next.