There's A Hole In My Heart Where You Used To Be. The Bagel: A Love Story

There is this one round chewy luxury of a breakfast food that I have longed for ever since moving to Seattle: the bagel.  It seems that everywhere I have lived has had a local institution with their own special recipe secrets, unique clientele, and rituals that let you know you’re home. 

My first eye opening experience with the bagel was in college in Ohio.  Bagel And Deli was a fast paced little restaurant, as narrow as a hallway and always full of every walk of life.  With what seemed like hundreds of interesting options (like the Randy Ayers, Pig In The Mud, Missy’s Bloodbath, or the tribute to our local basketball star, The Szczerbiak), on any given night this place was in its bagel sandwich pressing groove.

A few years later, I spent several weeks with my friend Sara in New York City.  At the time, she lived on the Upper East Side, and to this day is as in love with a good bagel as I am.  Due to their carboliscious density, bagels have kind of a bad rap that never quite recovered from the Atkin’s push of the late ’90’s.  (Not to mention the irresistible delight of biting into softened cream cheese smeared all over the crunchy toasted bagel).  We would start the day by discussing our more responsible breakfast options, scanning the fridge and feigning dismay when we didn’t have the healthy ingredients.  One of us would suggest (as though we had just come up with it right then), that maybe we could just stop by the bagel place on her way to work.  It was so close to the green line stop, it just made sense.  And so we did.

Other delicious bagels come to mind over time as well.  While far from perfect, the Dunkin Donuts everything bagel was my first exposure to a bagel that did not come in a plastic sleeve of six.  After college, our mini reunions in Chicago often demanded bagels for our epic breakfast all day parties, with one or two of the ladies setting out into the windy cold to fetch a dozen from Einstein Bros.  And then there is Hole In The Wall, across from the shipyard in Rockland, Maine.  Going there always guaranteed a nice long view to the harbor and a chance to read the local paper cover to cover. 

Here in Seattle, I haven’t yet found a delicious bagel.  Based on my past memories, I would venture to say that I need a ritual to make any establishment legit.  So this time, I decided to make them myself.  I first made a list of all of my favorite things about a bagel.  Dense.  Flavorful.  Chewy.  Crunchy crust.  Tasty salty toppings.  Never cinnamon raisin.  Ever. 

I then turned to my most trusted bread book: The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  This book came to my rescue when I wanted to serve English muffins to our sailing guests.  I had an extra good feeling when I saw that their beauty shot of the finished bagels were presented on the same plates we had growing up. 

I wanted to make sure that this recipe would help create my dream bagel as described above.  I read that these would be dense, as the dough has a much lower liquid to flour ratio than any other bread, at around 50% (as opposed to 55-65%).  They would be flavorful because of the long, slow fermentation time in the fridge, allowing the malt and naturally occurring enzymes to work their magic developing flavor.  The chewiness would come from the slow but not too high rise, the dense dough, and the boiling before baking.  Chewy bagels are made from boiling before baking, while softer bagels are steamed first.  The recipe promised a crunchy crust as long as I boiled them in water with baking soda and baked them at a high temperature of 500 degrees.  Tasty toppings would be up to me, and I already had poppy, sesame, and cumin seeds, onion flake, and coarse salt and pepper standing by.

The Recipe
Sponge:
1 tsp  instant yeast
4 c  unbleached bread flour (I used AP)
2 1/2 c  water, room temperature

I mixed these together well and covered with plastic, leaving at room temperature for 2 hours until bubbly and almost doubled in size. 

Dough:
1/2 tsp  instant yeast
3 3/4 c  unbleached bread flour
2 3/4 tsp  salt
2 tsp  malt powder, malt syrup, honey, or brown sugar

Starting with the sponge, I made the dough by mixing in the yeast, followed by the salt, malt, and flour.  I saved the last 3/4 c of flour until I started kneading and slowly worked it in over 10 minutes.  Unlike many other doughs, this one was not tacky, but rather firm.

I then went on to divide the dough into 12 pieces and rounded them up into balls.  I covered them with a damp towel and walked away for 20 minutes.  (This time was spent calling my mother to tell her what I was doing.) 

Shaped and ready to go!

Boiling the bagels

To avoid going on for pages and pages, I’ll summarize the next steps and tell you that I shaped them into bagels, then covered and placed them in the fridge overnight.  In the morning I boiled a huge pot of water with a couple tablespoons of baking soda and boiled the dough in batches for two minutes per side.  I sprinkled the bagels with toppings and popped them in a 500 degree oven, rotating every five minutes until they were crusty and firm to tap, about 12 minutes. 

Finished bagels

Then I ate them.  The first one I went with the classic, just good quality butter.  The second one graduated to cream cheese status.  The rest have been enjoyed by Jaimy and myself, mostly bagel sandwiches with cream cheese, hard salami, sharp cheddar, and a fried egg.  I would have included a photo of it, but I am pretty sure my health insurance provider would drop me if they saw it.  I should probably make an appointment to get my cholesterol checked. 

What is your favorite bagel and where is it from?

The Things I Miss The Most

The other evening I went out to dinner with friends.  Over bountiful salads, a croque monsieur, and steak frites, we landed on the topic of comfort foods and things we miss from our youth.  From doughnuts to Spam, we each had different thoughts on childhood culinary delights.  It is so interesting how canned corned beef can make one person so nostalgic, and another traumatized at the sheer memory of opening that can.  For the record, breakfast, lunch, and dinner were all represented in the wonder-meat discussion.

This is just one example of many food related nostalgic discussions.  Everyone’s favorite comfort foods seem to stem from family tradition (including spiritual or ethnic customs), geographic location, and of course those unique discoveries and circumstances from which we draw our best (and worst) memories.  I believe that there is a worldwide understanding of the sacred love of a meal made by one’s mother, father, or grandparent.  Last summer, I watched a good friend labor over a very special cheesecake.  It was her mother-in-law’s recipe, and she was trying to recreate it for her husband on his birthday.  Desperately trying to source Zwiebeck cookies (or some kind of teething cookie for the unique crust), she cast aside her Pastry Chef degree experience in order to reproduce this sacred cake.  It is one of those weird things, this silent respect for the food made by those who raised us.

I will always remember my father taking the family on an adventure into the heart of Lowell, MA to seek out George’s Subs.  This was the sub shop that we used as a basis of comparison to all other sandwich establishments.  When we went, my father told the story (every single time) about going to George’s with my mother back when he was studying at UMass Lowell.  I think it has been about eighteen years since I have feasted on their Italian sub, but I can still feel the subtle softness of the bread and taste the zesty vinegar over mortadella, salami, ham, and provolone. 

And, of course, there are the emotionally and gag reflex triggered negative memories.  To this day, I completely dissect fillet of sole, remembering myself as a seven year old with a needle-like bone poking into my narrow throat.  My mother still talks about being forced to eat canned asparagus when her family was stationed in Germany.  To this day, I believe she skips the canned food aisle, hoping to avoid shuddering at the memory. 

Before I get to the food item that inspired my latest project, I want to make a list of my personal comfort foods.  This list includes childhood memories, brief experiences and homes along the way (where I needed a little extra love, even if it was in the form of food), and things I love now as I build my own house of memories and traditions. 

My all time childhood favorite was ground beef tacos, the kind with crunchy shells from a box and grated cheese, chopped tomato, and iceberg lettuce.  Sausage bread (do I detect a ground meat theme here?), where Mom baked fresh bread with sharp white cheddar and spicy sausage rolled up in it.  Chicken with rice and a creamy dijon sauce, where Mom could sneak a huge pile of broccoli onto the plate and I’d still eat every last bite.  Ham glazed with pineapple and maraschino cherries, with the warm aroma beating down the drafty chill of Christmas day at Grandma’s house.  Sweet peas picked fresh from the vine and served in a bowl of ice water, Mom’s tan gardening arms hugging me tightly.  Fried dough on the weekend with Dad and my brother Adam, our misadventures in the kitchen when Mom was at work.  The dough came fresh out of the hot oil and directly into a paper bag with cinnamon sugar- one of us shaped the dough, Dad fried it, and the other shook the bag before piling them high on a plate.  Along with this memory, I recall the sound of Dad popping corn on the stovetop, shaking the pot vigorously over the electric coil to keep the kernels from burning.  That too went into a paper bag, this time shaken with butter and salt. 

Despite starting to drink coffee at fifteen (I loved Mom’s coffee breath in the early morning, much as my cat loves mine now), I truly fell in love with coffee in college.  Far from home I found a new family of friends, where my best memories revolved around our favorite coffee shop named Buzz and a certain red kitchen table on Vine Street.  We drank from thrift store mugs and shared stories of the day and dreams (and fears) of the future.  My last semester of school was especially stressful, and my friend Megan used to come by and start my coffee pot on her way to work.  For the first time since living with my parents, I awoke to the aroma of someone loving me unconditionally. 

When I spent a semester in Italy, my favorite comfort foods included pizza di carciofi (artichoke pizza) and ravioli di noci alle panna e gorgonzola (Walnut ravioli with a gorgonzola cream sauce).  Practicing restraint had never been one of my strengths.  Back at school, I matured beyond weekend Papa John’s pizza with garlic sauce and started actually cooking.  My dear friend Alicia showed me a love for food that I had tucked away for years, and we spent a summer making the best pizzas, salads, tacos, and pancakes I can remember. 

Then, in Maine, for the first time in my life I started to find comfort in my own cooking.  This opened up a whole new world to me, and while I didn’t know it at the time, began to shape my future.  It took the patient wisdom of my culinary and life mentor, Ellen, to show me the value of being methodical and organized in cooking (and let’s face it, also in health, matters of the heart, and pretty much across the board).  It is there where I never tired of making apple crisp, rustic french style loaves of bread, chowder and tomato based stews, and fresh pasta served with a bolognese that simmered for hours on end. 

Now, in Seattle, the food I make is a collage of those memories.  Jaimy and I share experiences of our youth and travels through what we cook for one another.  I also develop new meals inspired by current ideas and what I am learning now.  What hasn’t changed is the love I put in the food.  What has changed is the patience.  I remember jumping up and down, so excited for the fried dough to be ready.  Had it been up to me I would have pulled it half raw out of the oil.  Last week I fried chicken wings Vietnamese style, and while I contemplated pulling the wings as soon as I saw the telltale darkening of the skin, I patiently (still hovering though) waited for the deep golden brown that promised a crispy bite. 

A bit long on this one.  Tomorrow, I’ll dive into the thing I miss the most.  There will even be pictures.