kareina

As mentioned in in-progress updates twice already today, I tried a bagel recipe today and made a second batch with what I consider to be a much more reasonable amount of sugar (I used honey in my version) and salt.

While my version rose higher in the mixing bowl before punching down, they behaved differently during shaping, boiling and baking. The one following the recipe puffed up to little round balls, with most of their rising going upwards, while my version rose both up and out, and so wound up looking a bit more like a bagel.

On the other hand, slicing them open and looking at the texture inside and they look exactly the same. The only way to tell them apart is to taste them. The recipe version tastes salty and slightly sweet, mine is just pure, yummy, bready flavour. However, even the recipie version is good enough to be willing to eat, it is just that mine is better. In fact, I had intended to eat only a half bagel of each type for the taste-test comparison, but both were good enough, still hot from the oven, that I ate a full bagel each, and my mouth is voting for going back for another (but my tum thinks I would be wise to stop here for an hour or so).

If your diet consists of large quantities of restaurant food or the pre-made heat & eat supermarket options you will probably like the original recipe better, because you are accustomed to high levels of sugar and salt in your diet. If, on the other hand, you eat like I do, with at least 95% of your food home made or fresh and you rarely reach for the sugar or salt jars, you will, like me, strongly prefer my version.

This morning there was a link to a bagel recipe in my blog reader. While I have baked probably 1000's of batches of bread, rolls, etc. over the years I have never actually bothered to bake bagels, so today I decided to try it. However, that recpipe has obscenly huge amounts of both sugar and salt compared to the way I typically bake. On the other hand, it is also a tiny batch of dough. Therefore I decided to do two batches--one using the full amount of sugar and salt specified, and one using only 1 teaspoon of honey instead of 1.5 tablespoons of sugar and only 0.25 teaspoons of salt instead of 1.25 teaspoons.

They are rising now. Stay tuned for a review in a couple of hours, when they are done. My hypothesis is that my version will taste much better, and will probably rise just as much--while mine has less sugar (which tends to make for happy yeast), it also has less salt (which tends to inhibit yeast).