SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 24 — I hunched over the stove wearing protective eyewear and rubber gloves, boiling a pot of water laced with a toxic, corrosive chemical.
I wasn’t trying to dissolve a body like Walter White in Breaking Bad. I wanted to recreate the perfect East Coast bagel, the kind with a glossy brown, crunchy crust and pillowy crumb, the kind I’ve found to be elusive here in San Francisco, where airy buns with holes try to pass for the real thing.
The bubbling caldron was the final step in a three-month baking saga that was as maddening as it was gratifying. The good news is it only took me 300 bagels to nail it. The frustrating news is that the key to nailing it had been just across the Bay Bridge all along.
My journey of 300 bagels began in May and became an office ritual. A native Californian who spent only two years in New York (long enough to become indoctrinated with East Coast bagel and pizza snobbery) I complained bitterly about missing my blistery gold, crunchy salt bagel with a sun-dried tomato schmear from Ess-a-Bagel in Midtown Manhattan. No matter. I would make my own.
Every week after filing my technology column for the business section, I would treat my colleagues with results of my experimentation. After a few weeks, I thought I had perfected it.
I told my editor. She told the Food section. They invited me to prove it. I submitted my recipe, overnighted some bagels to my colleagues and prepared to write a how-to article.
But the Food editors told me to wait just a minute: A recipe tester for The New York Times (and the author of a pizza cookbook) was going to try to beat my bagel. Better yet, the tester would bake my bagels and four contenders, and let a panel of bagel snobs at The Times judge whose were best.
You know what happened: I lost. And paradoxically, the panel picked a bagel from a transplanted East Coast baker: Dan Graf, 32, the owner of Baron Baking, based in Oakland, California.
I was in bitter denial. I tried Graf’s recipe, which was published in The Times in 2012. I baked bagels using both of our recipes. I preferred mine to his.
My bagel, a result of combining techniques from over a dozen recipes online, in cookbooks and in YouTube videos, was admittedly complicated. (I destroyed and repaired my stand mixer twice while experimenting with it.)
But I believed it was worth it. I liked the crunchy crust from boiling the bagels and baking them at a very high heat; I liked the tangy flavour from the sourdough starter.
Graf’s recipe — a combination of high-gluten flour, salt, water, malt powder and yeast boiled in a solution of salt and baking soda and then baked — was simpler, more straightforward. It resulted in a chewier crust and a nice crumb, but his bagels had a slightly yellow tint and a bitter aftertaste from the baking soda.
I invited Graf to meet me at a cafe, where, aficionado to aficionado, we could swap our creations and politely judge each other.
Graf, a brawny-looking bearded man with glasses, called my bagel “phenomenal”, adding, “If I saw that in a store, I would buy it.” He also complimented me for the extra punch in flavour from the starter. But he noticed some cracks on the bottom half of my bagels and recommended flipping them in the oven to prevent them from drying out.
Then I ate a Baron bagel. It had a pretzel-like brown crust, a delightful chew and a rich, nutty flavour. His bagels were perfectly shaped and shiny, like something that could be on the cover of Bon Appétit.
“Yours are definitely better,” I said. He did not disagree.
I asked Graf whether he had changed his recipe. He said no, but added that the version he offered to The Times was tailored for home kitchens. For more flavour, he mixes a starter and lets it sit for about 28 hours. This serves as a base for the dough. After the bagels are rolled and shaped, they ferment in the refrigerator for another 20 hours.
And he uses a secret ingredient: Lye, or sodium hydroxide, in the water, a chemical base used for boiling pretzels, making soap and cleaning drains (that last phrase being one you don’t want to see in a sentence about food).
A tiny amount of lye dramatically increases the pH level of the water, Graf said, which results in the crispy brown crust. But use too much — or boil it in the wrong kind of pot (a stainless steel one is required) — and it could be poisonous.
“There is that liability there of, like, ‘Oh, don’t poison yourself’,” Graf said. “It’s really caustic.” So his home recipe instructs the baker to boil the bagels in salted water. (Our reporter revised his recipe in 2012 to include baking soda, a common alternative to lye.)
Here I was trying to perfect the bagel and working with a G-rated version of his recipe. “It’s the tragedy of the food commons,” he said, referring to the simplification of home recipes.
I was determined to try lye. By coincidence, I had dinner days later with a friend who had an unopened bottle in his closet. My friend had gone through a pretzel-making phase and had hoped to experiment with boiling in lye, but never had the guts to open the bottle labelled in red: “Poison: Causes Severe Burns.”
I took the bottle home. The next morning, I drank a cup of coffee and put on my safety gear.
Graf told me in an email to weigh the water and the lye so the chemical accounted for 0.15 per cent of the solution. Using a kitchen scale, I weighed a pot with 2,200g of water (a bit more than a half-gallon) and determined I needed about 3g of lye, which amounted to a small pinch. (For safe measurements, brave bagel makers should always weigh the lye with a scale). I dropped the lye into the stainless steel pot of water, brought it to a boil and added the bagels. The water turned a disturbing yellow.
But after I transferred the bagels to the oven and baked them for 20 minutes, flipping them halfway through the cooking, I knew my quest had come to an end. The bagels came out exactly how I wanted them: Crunchy and brown with a glossy sheen, a nice chew and soft inside. Not nearly as perfect as Graf’s, but exceptional for a bagel from a home kitchen.
That day, some friends dropped by for brunch. Not one of them was poisoned. We fantasised for a moment about quitting our jobs and opening a bakery.
But then we remembered Graf, and that his establishment delivers bagels to grocery stores and restaurants throughout the Bay Area, including a nearby Whole Foods, and that he could give Ess-a-Bagel a run for its money.
Baron Bagels
Total time: About 1 hour, plus a 2-hour rise and overnight fermentation
Yield: 10 bagels
1 teaspoon/3g active dry yeast
5 cups/600g bread flour
3 tablespoons/54g sea salt, divided
1 tablespoon/8g diastatic malt powder
2 tablespoons/40g baking soda
1/4 cup poppy seeds, optional
1/4 cup sesame seeds, optional
1. Put the yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer. Add 1 2/3 cups/365g lukewarm water and allow the yeast to activate, about 5 minutes. Add flour, 1 tablespoon/18g salt and malt powder and mix at low speed for 5 minutes using the dough hook. Cover the dough and allow to rise at room temperature for about 2 hours.
2. Punch the dough down and shape into a rough rectangle about 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick, and about 2 times longer than it is wide. If you are having trouble forming the dough, stretch it, wait for the gluten to relax and re-form.
3. Cut the dough into 10 pieces of about 3 ounces each. Roll each into an 8-inch-long snakelike shape, tapering the dough at each end. Circle the dough around your hand, pinching the ends together and rolling under your palm once or twice to seal. Put the bagels on a Silpat or other non-stick baking sheet on top of a jellyroll pan. Cover well with plastic wrap and refrigerate for about 10 hours, or up to 24 hours.
4. Heat the oven to 425 degrees. If you have a baking stone or brick you use for baking, put it on a rack near the bottom of the oven; it will retain heat and produce a crisper bagel. Bring a large pot of water to boil, add the remaining salt and the baking soda into the boiling water and remove the bagels from the refrigerator.
5. Carefully place just enough bagels into the pot to cover the surface of the water, making sure that there are no bagels resting on top of one another. Let them float on 1 side for 1 minute before flipping them to the other side for another minute or so. Remove the bagels and drain well on a cooling rack.
6. Pour poppy or sesame seeds into a bowl wider than the bagels. Working very quickly, remove the bagels one by one and dip them into the topping. Place them back on the Silpat-covered baking sheet, topping side down.
7. Bake on the second to highest shelf of the oven for 8 to 10 minutes. Then flip the bagels, rotate the pan and continue baking for about 8 minutes, or until they are golden brown. — The New York Times
