Inspired by my friend at La Cerise, I made the mini-bagels she made from the Delicious Days posting. Of course, I first consulted my cooking bible, aka The Best Recipe by Cook's Illustrated. According to their tests, bagels should only be made with high-gluten flour (14g plus), which makes them more elastic, lighter, smoother, chewier, taller, etc, etc. This article threw me into another tailspin of internet research on flour available in Switzerland/Europe (read more here...)
Anyway, I tried the bagels with Halbweissmehl, with pleasing results. But there's certainly lots of room for improvement. Here's what I learned today:
Anyway, I tried the bagels with Halbweissmehl, with pleasing results. But there's certainly lots of room for improvement. Here's what I learned today:
- Halbweissmehl at 13g protein provides decent, if not excellent structure. I still may import some high-gluten flour, but I'll keep baking in the meantime.
- My bagel shaping needs serious help. I may try the technique from The Best Recipe, where you roll dough segments into ropes then form into circles, pinching the overlapped ends together. This is bound to make them smoother.
- 200C was not nearly hot enough. After 15 minutes, my little bagels were barely golden. I'm going to try 220C next time.
And now for my bagels story, in pictures:
dough cut into 16 pieces ... then made into bagel shapes, kinda
boiling a mere 30 seconds ... out of the oven
with a little homemade apple butter...yum yum!
1 comment:
Hey, great post! Those make me hungry! I wish they could be whipped up in a jiffy. They look great, and no more lumpy than mine. It's just that by the third batch, I learned to tuck all the lumps underneath the bagels. Kind of cheating, but it makes a smooth top and a very rumpled bottom.
Anyway I thought of you as I wondered which flour to use with these. I too read the Cooks Illustrated recipe and felt discouraged by the flour issue.
I also made a fourth batch this weekend. I let the dough rise a little less than an hour, shaped the bagels and then put them in the fridge overnight (I wanted bagels in the morning). However it wasn't such a good idea, they were a bit deflated by the time they baked. The taste was great, but they were flat-ish. I should reread the Cooks Illustrated recipe, I believe they use an overnight rising techique.
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