Mmmmm......dough....and stuff...
Sunday morning. Bagel Experiment gone obscenely and terribly wrong in one respect - I never considered how they might all be simultaneously eaten by me.
Otherwise - WOW! HOORAY!! [Insert Howard Dean noise here!!!]
I was afraid in the beginning. So very afraid. My bread-making pride took a serious blow back in April when I attempted to make hamburger and hotdog rolls. Oh sure...they were edible...but really only useful for somebody about 1/5th my size.
OK...what I started with:
1.5 cups fed Shoggoth. I added to it (per
cvillette's recommendation) 1/2 cup of lukewarm scalded whole milk, plus 1 cup of distilled water, and 3 cups of flour. I covered it and let it sit by itself to burble away for 10 hours.
While I find manual kneading of dough to be an unbelievably pleasurable experience, the bottom line is that we're finishing up a set of pipes and using my Kitchen Aid mixer to do the work for me creates more pleasure on account of working smart and not hard.
So in went the burble...to it I added 3 tablespoons EVOO, 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 2 cups of additional flour. Then I employed the bread hook to do my evil bidding. I did add more than a cup of additional flour to the mix before I deemed the dough "ready for the finishing floor" (in the words of Norm Abram).
I covered my dough with oil, covered the container and gave it a couple of hours to rise.
At this point I ran into a little logistical dilemma - carry on or go to bed? I sort of danced like Homer Simpson, shaking my hands with worry, wondering oh God what will happen if I just let it sit here overnight? Continuing on with an unknown baking process was likely to throw me out of our early-to-bed-early-to-rise routine...
In the end I decided to sleep on it...it did not appear that my dough ball had risen enough in two hours. I wonder if immediately dividing it and rolling the dough balls after kneading would alleviate this condition?
In any case, my dough ball had risen substantially this morning. I divided, rolled and formed my bagels. I got 12 regular sized bagels out of this mix - I can't tell you how exciting it was to realize just how easy it is to make a bagel from a solid ball. The hole formation thing was daunting...but in the end I had great success just punching through the middle with my thumbs, and then lassoing it around my index finger to enlarge the hole evenly.
Pre par-boiling:
Par-boiling. Huh? Wha? Never done it before. But the more I read about it the more my confidence grew. It's like deep-frying without the mess, fussy temperature management, and risk of 3rd degree burns. Took the advice to throw some baking soda into my boiling water. It went really fast...less than a minute each really for those little guys to float to the top.
After draining them off on a rack, I moved them to a greased cookie sheet.
I decided to experiment as best I could with what I had on hand in the house:
3 plain
3 salted
2 garlic
2 sugar
2 cinnamon & sugar
Baked at 400 degrees for 25 minutes. The smell during baking was enough to make me want to lay on the kitchen floor sucking my thumb like a baby. Instead I practiced playing the flute and worked on 'Kitty Gone A Milking'.
I'm so happy, and can't wait to be hungry again to try another one. I had one of the garlic bagels with cream cheese. So good. Tim had a plain one with butter.