Dark Side of the Fridge

I’ve been subscribing to a sourdough baking newsletter for quite a while now, and let me tell you – there are people out there who take this whole sourdough thing SERIOUSLY!  I mean. . . wow.    So anyway, after a brief hiatus, Theresa at Northwest Sourdough shared her egg bagel recipe.  The directions were detailed, we’ve got started in the fridge, so . . . who am I to turn away from a tasty, bready challenge?  Particularly one that’s on my List!

So . . . first the ingredients.

Sourdough starter – check.  Water – check.  Eggs, oil, salt, bread flour – good to go.  The recipe called for “gluten flour” – that’s probably what we buy labeled “vital wheat gluten.”

Um. . . non diastatic malt syrup?  I have no idea.

So I did the next best thing – I went to our local brewing and hydroponic gardening store and asked about it.

After all, where there’s beer there’s malt, right?

Yeah, they had no idea.  The suggested I go to a bagel shop and ask.  Seriously!  (Though to be honest, I’m pretty sure it was only a matter of time before one of them asked where the Doritos were. . . )

Clearly left to my our devices, Peeps and I decided that “malt extract” was probably pretty much the same thing as “malt syrup” and, if not, well, the smallest can in the place didn’t set us back that much.

Following the directions – I mixed a HUGE batch of dough.  And a firm dough it was, too, which only makes sense.  Bagels are a heavy, dense bread – we don’t want soft and airy dough, now do we?

Now this recipe differs from many others in that it directs me to let the dough rise, at this stage, for 4-6 hours, until it’s doubled in bulk.

Then it was time to make the bagels.  I divided the dough into 12 5-ounce blobs, then shaped each into a nice little ball.

And poked a hole in each little dough ball:

Then stretched the hole out until I had something more bagel-shaped.

Ta da!

And then the young bagels had to set out and rise again.  For a couple of hours.

By this time, as is to be expected, the bagels were HUGE!  They had risen to nearly twice their size and were more than ready for the next step.

And the next step was boiling them.  You know, this is what’s cool about bagels.  I mean, who EVER dreamed up the idea of making a bread dough, rising it, dumping it boiling water, THEN baking it?  Doesn’t it make you wonder what they were thinking?

We boiled a pot of water, and to the water, we added more of the malt syrup/extract stuff, some salt, and a tablespoon of baking soda, then gently dropped the bagels in, to boil half a minute on each side (they floated to the top and needed to be turned).

Once all the bagels had been boiled, I baked them until they were delightfully GBD.

So here’s the thing about these bagels.  I’m sure you can see – they’re far fatter and puffier than any bagel should be.  Don’t get me wrong – they were probably the tastiest bagels I’ve ever had, but the texture was wrong.  The appeared overproofed, which I should have known would happen when you let them rise as long as these did!

However, never one to let a tasty bread product go to waste, I will tell you that they made a delicious (if huge!) sandwich roll!

And, never one to admit defeat, I decided to revisit the bagel experiment once again.  I did a bit of research and found that this procedure was somewhat, well, unorthodox.

I used the same recipe (split in half) with an amalgamation of several other recipes for the rising-cooking-timing process.  This time, we covered the tray of shaped bagels and stuck them in the fridge overnight for a long, slow, cool rise.

However, it seems that I still should let them rise outside the fridge before the overnight chill – they did NOT want to float in the water!

Eventually, though, they warmed up a bit and rose a bit and were slightly buoyant, and we carried on as before.

This time, I also made the bagels a little more reasonably sized – just under 4 ounces (which is certainly hefty enough).  The slower rise, as well as just less rising in general, produced a much heavier, denser product, and still just as delicious.

Now, next time, I just need to remember the parchment – even after a quick boil, and with a layer of semolina on the tray, those buggers still stuck like crazy!  But they still tasted mighty good.  We’re getting there – another couple of tries, and I should be an expert!