Bron and the Bearded Bagel Baker

Once upon a Saturday, Bron and her bearded beloved decided to bake bagels for the first time.

The library lent them "Bread: from sourdough to Rye" by Linda Collister. The bagel recipe looked promising (though they didn't recognise any of the recipes supposedly from Australia and NZ in the last chapter!)

They mixed the dough, let it rise, punched it down, then formed it into a dozen springy balls. Next they poked their fingers through each ball, spun it around on their fingers, and made a bagel-ly, doughnut shape. Then they remembered to take pictures for posterity!

After another rest, the dough was plunged into a pot of boiling water and Bron and her bagel baker took turns to deftly flip each bagel with a scoop.

Each doughy tourniquet was brushed with egg white, and some were sprinkled with sesame seeds.

And baked in the oven to golden brown perfection.

It was hard to wait for them to cool down.

Beautiful bready aromas filled the kitchen as Bron and the bearded one waited... and waited...

... and finally gave in...

... smothering their beauties with homemade strawberry jam! MMMMMM!

The Bakery

Ever since the food course, we have been much more conscious of what we are putting in our mouths, and what food we are buying. More about that in another post - suffice to say that we are now using organic flour whenever possible.

The flour is important because it is the most basic ingredient in bread-making. Our place has begun to resemble a bakery over the last few months as we've hardly bought bread from the supermarket since July.

It started when we returned to Canada in July, and I was home while Nathan did Hebrew at summer school and I got ready for teaching school. Long periods in an empty basement suite were filled with yeasting, waiting, mixing, kneading, waiting, rising, waiting, baking, and waiting while cooling. I tried my hand at a sourdough starter with rye flour and water. It was a bit of a hit and miss affair. I made a VERY dense loaf at one stage (pictured below) and threw a large amount of starter into the compost! The last lot migrated to the compost when I cleaned the fridge earlier this month. It was 'well fermented', shall we say? No recipe for you, as it was probably one of my least successful baking endeavours ever.

I reverted to my trusty basic bread recipe from our awesome Aussie friend, Susannah. Once you've made the plain white loaf a few times you can easily judge if the dough needs more flour or water by touch. If you double the recipe, it makes one large loaf, or two smallish ones.

Susannah's Basic Bread

2 cups of flour
1 cup warm water
1 teaspoon of dried yeast
1 teaspoon (or less) of salt [sometimes I put in vegemite/marmite instead of salt]
1 teaspoon of sugar/honey etc
1 tablespoon of oil.

Activate yeast by putting it in warm water with the sugar. When it is frothy, mix it with the dry ingredients and oil. Knead. Allow to sit in warm place, covered with loose cling film. After about and hour, knead again then form into desired shape. Place in cooking pan and allow to rise in a warm place for about 30 mins. Bake in a moderate oven for 20-40 minutes.

I also found success making cinnamon rolls - the Vancouver specialty. Here they are before... and after baking, but without their crown of cream cheese frosting.

Nathan tried his hand at making bread over the recent reading week, and has been bitten by a yeasty bug too... making bread every 4 or 5 days ever since. He experimented with whole wheat flour and decided that a mix of white and whole wheat was more pleasant than the dense rolls he first started with. Next he's going to try using spelt flour.

So, now that we've perfected this recipe, Nath suggested we try making bagels (one of the few bread products we have bought recently). A visit to the library was duly made, and we spent a fun Saturday morning making a dozen bagels to a recipe in "Bread: from sourdough to rye" by Linda Collister (adapted to include more marmite, of course!) My next post will be a photo-journal of our fun.