Bagels

Everyone has their perfect bagel, unfortunately these aren’t them.  Don’t get me wrong, they are a great bagel.  They just aren’t perfect.  They do, however, probably come as close to the perfect bagel as you can make a home and outside of New York City.

This recipe comes from one of my newly favorite bread books, Artisan Breads at Home by the Culinary Institute of America.  This books is arranged a little oddly, but makes great bread.  And, as any good bread book should, includes measurements by weight and bakers percentage.  It’s big contribution is the addition of malt syrup to breads to give them a better rise and better flavor.

The key pieces to making good bagels at home are using malt syrup and a good quality high protein flour.  You want a flour with a higher protein content than normal bread flour.  I’ve chosen to use Sir Lancelot Flour from King Arthur Flour.

 

Here is the mise en place for the bagels.  As you can see there are only three ingredients, other than water and salt.

These bagels start with a sponge.  Sponges are just a type of quick preferment to give the bread a better flavor.  This sponge starts with water and malt syrup.

The sponge also has some flour and yeast.

Here is the sponge.  It sits out in a covered bowl for an hour.

Next up is the main dough.  Again, it starts with some water and malt syrup.

The finished sponge gets added to the water mixture.

The sponge and wet ingredients get all mixed together with the dough hook.

Then the remaining flour, yeast, and salt get mixed in.

Once the dough is mixed and the gluten has fully developed, it gets turned out onto the counter.  Since the flour has a higher protein content, it will actually take longer to fully develop the gluten.  The dough is also very stiff.  These two things together make it so that your stand mixer can overheat.  If it does, then you’ll need to revert to kneading by hand.

The dough should then be measured out into roughly 5 ounce pieces and shaped into an oblong.

After a quick rest on the counter, the dough is ready to be shaped into a bagel.  The first step was to flatten it out into a rectangle.

Then shape it into a long snake by constantly folding down in thirds.

One end of the dough can then be wet and attached to the other end to make a circle.  To fully seal the shape, it should be rolled around your fingers, gently pressing on the dough.

The bagels then need to retard in the refrigerator over night.

The next day, after the bagels have been removed and brought to room temperature, a large pot of water and malt syrup should be brought to a boil.

Each bagel should be boiled for 20 seconds, then placed on a baking sheet.  At this point various toppings can be added to the bagels.  I opted for plain and a few with salt.

The bagels then bake at 475 degrees Fahrenheit for about 14 minutes.

They come out nice and golden brown with a slightly blistered crust.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

For Christmas every year my wife and I bake cookies for friends and coworkers.  This post, plus the following two will be a few of the cookies we made this year.

Chocolate chip cookies are a staple baked good.  We always have the ingredients on hand and we make them frequently throughout the year. 

This recipe is a variation on the Tollhouse cookie recipe and yields a somewhat softer and cake-ier cookie than the original recipe.  The variation comes from my mother: the flour is increased and the ratio of brown sugar to granulated sugar has been altered.

Here is the recipe:

3 1/4 cups All-Purpose Flour

1 teaspoon Baking Soda

1 teaspoon Salt

1 cup Softened Unsalted Butter (2 sticks)

1 cup Brown Sugar

1/2 cup Granulated Sugar

1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract

2 Large Eggs

~2 cups Semisweet Chocolate Chips

This is the mise en place for the chocolate chip cookies.  I’m making a double batch, so the quantities will be doubled.

The butter and sugars go into a bowl and get creamed together.

Then the eggs and vanilla get mixed in.

This is what the mixture will look like after the eggs and vanilla get mixed in.

Next up is the dry ingredients.  When making chocolate chip cookies, rather than getting another bowl dirty i usually just put the baking soda and salt in with the first cup of flour.

This is the cookie dough after all the flour has been mixed in.

Lastly, the chocolate chips get mixed in.

The dough then gets dropped onto a cookie sheet.  You can vary the size, but I usually go with about 1-2 heaping tablespoons.

The cookies then bake at 375 Fahrenheit for 8-12 minutes, depending on the size of the cookies.

Portuguese Sweet Bread

This week I decided to make some Portuguese Sweet Bread.  It is sometimes called Hawaiian bread due to its popularity there.  The recipe for this once again came from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. 

This bread is somewhat rich from the butter and egg.  It is also a little citrusy.  The bread is good on its own, but makes for some outstanding French toast.

This is the mise en place for the sponge for the bread.

First, the dry ingredients go into a bowl and mixed.

The sponge gets water added and mixed together.

The sponge sits for an hour or two until its extremely bubbly and ready to collapse onto itself.

This is the mise en place for the dough, minus salt.

The butter, sugar, and dry milk are measured and ready for mixing.

Then they all get creamed together.

The eggs and extracts get mixed into the butter until smooth.

Then the bread flour gets kneaded in for about 10 minutes.  It should pass the windowpane test, when the dough can be spread out so that you can see through it.

The dough shaped into a ball and set in an oiled bowl.  It then has to ferment for about two hours.

At that point, the dough get “punched down” and reshaped into a ball.  It then gets placed into an oiled pie tin and left on the counter to proof for another two hours.

Here is a shot of the dough, with the skin pulled tight.

After the proofing period, it gets brushed with egg wash and baking in the oven for 50 minutes.

After baking, the crust gets a deep mahogany brown.

And here is a final shot of the bread in slices.

Spicy Peanut Butter Cookies

This week I bring you my own recipe for spicy peanut butter cookies.  Peanut butter cookies are some of my favorite kind of cookie.  These were inspired a few years back by finding a spicy peanut butter in a grocery store.  It was “The Heat Is On” peanut butter from Peanut Butter & Co.  They make some other great peanut butter flavors that can also be substituted in this recipe.  This particular spicy peanut butter add heat with chili powder, cayenne peppers, crushed red peppers, and paprika.  The resulting peanut butter cookie isn’t overly spicy, but has a nice flavor and a slow burn that hits you over time.  The spicy peanut butter can sometimes be found in normal grocery stores or Whole Foods.  If you can’t find any, the company does ship it on their website.

Here’s the recipe (makes about 3-4 dozen cookies):

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 & 1/2 cup brown sugar

1 cup spicy peanut butter (The Heat Is On)

1 cup softened butter

2 large eggs

2 & 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 & 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Some extra granulated sugar

Here is the mise en place for the cookies.

Like most cookies, these start with creaming the butter with the sugar.  In this cake, it also includes the peanut butter.  Some peanut butter cookie recipes call for adding the peanut butter after the dry ingredients have been added, I’ve found it easier to do at the beginning.  Mixing at the end tends to cause you to over mix the flour and you end up with tough cookies.

Here are the two eggs about to go into the cookie dough.

Here is the cookie dough after adding the eggs.

This is the final cookie dough after the dry ingredients have been mixed in.  It should still be pretty sticky, but firm enough to shape into balls and hold its shape.

The dough then gets rolled into balls about 1 & 1/2 inches in diameter and placed onto a baking sheet.  I always prefer using a silpat covered air bake cookie sheet when baking cookies.

Then dip a fork into the extra sugar and press down each cookie twice.  Once in one direction, the second time in the opposite direction.  You’ll want to dip the fork into the sugar between each press so that it doesn’t stick to the cookie.  If you are making different flavors of peanut butter cookies, you can experiment with different utensils and creating a different pattern on top each flavor of cookie.  That way you can tell which flavor is which.

Here are the cookies after baking for about 11 minutes.  There is one missing because my wife couldn’t wait until I took the picture to eat one.

And of course, here is a close up of one of the cookies.