What are you Baking the week of January 26, 2020?

[Mike Nolan]

Stanley Ginsberg's book The Rye Baker talks quite a bit about the differences between baking with wheat flour and with rye flour, getting into the underlying chemical changes, and why a sour rye starter is helpful when making high rye percentage (all the way up to 100%) breads. I've already read that chapter twice and I'm sure I'll read it a few more times.

[Italiancook]

BakerAunt, I am certain the rye flour I used came from the grocery store. I'm unsure whether the recipe I used was on the bag or from my one and only cookbook at the time. I'll try chocomouse's suggestion of KAF Sandwich Rye. I don't have Reinhart's book, Mike.

CORRECTON: I may have misled people when I wrote that I used half butter and half olive oil in my yellow cake. I subbed the olive oil, using 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil for 1/2 cup butter.

[Mike Nolan]

If you search for 'Reinhart marbled rye recipe', it looks like there are at least two sites having a version of his recipe, though not quite identical to the one in my edition of BBA, which calls for shortening rather than oil.

To get the two shades of dough I use corn syrup in the light one and light molasses in the dark one, and I also add some powdered caramel color that I got from King Arthur.

I divide both recipes into 6 parts and flatten them into rectangles, then make 3 stacks of light/dark/light/dark. Which one I put on the outside varies, I can never decide which I like better on the outside.

I press the stacks even flatter then roll each stack up into a loaf shape, producing 3 loaves with the marbled spiral when you cut it. I bake them free form, but you can also bake them in a loaf pan, in which case you might want to make just 2 loaves.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Mike, the pie bottom looks great! Never though of transferring a pie too. I may have to try a Norpro pan. My Norpro griddle has been a bit of a disappointment.

Around here (central CT) and in Portland/Camden MA where I've talked to bakers coffee is trendy to put into dark rye breads for color. I'm not sure how it affects taste. And for me to really know I would need to taste it blind.

My wife has never liked rye but after giving her some rye without caraway we discovered that the caraway is really what she objected to.

I tend to think I live in a suburban backwater but we can find lots of things in the grocery stores here even if it's more expensive than online. We also have a lot of ethnic groceries - various Asian and eastern European - and rye flours are popular in the German and Polish groceries. And I'd rather support small grocery stores than buy online.

I've made a slight change to my pizza dough. I stopped using cake flour and started using Caputo oo flour. It's pretty fine but there is very little info on the bag. It might be bleached. I'll need to research on the internet. But it's half the price of cake flour.

Chocomouse, congrats on the bagels! They're on my list for this year. Did you put baking soda in the water?

And BA thanks for the tip about boiling to long. Most recipes I've read have you boil them for several minutes per side.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by aaronatthedoublef.

[Joan Simpson]

Chocomouse I'm glad you had success with bagels,taste is all that matters.

Mike your crust on the apple pies look great,that Norpro pan is nice!

[Mike Nolan]

According to the web, all Caputo flours are unbleached, and any European flour is unbrominated. I don't think I have a local source for it, but I don't use a lot of cake flour anyway.

Personally, I think I can taste coffee in both bread and chocolate. It's a cheat anyway, that's NOT how Eastern European black breads are colored! They do it the old-fashioned way by slow baking the bread so the Maillard reaction happens on the inside. Adding molasses or barley syrup will also darken breads, and there are some rye bread recipes that call for them.

What bagel recipe did you use? I've been using the one in Reinhart's Artisan book (ABED) because it makes a smaller amount of dough. Bagel dough should be really smooth, Peter calls it satiny. I scale it, rolling it into balls, then let it rest for a few minutes before shaping it. I use the poke a hole in the middle method to shape bagels for two reasons. One is I have fairly big hands. The other is we prefer 3 ounce bagels to the 4.5 ounce ones you get at the deli, and that's just not enough dough to do the wrap around the hand method.

Most recipes tell you to make sure the bagels pass the float test before boiling them, but most of the time by the time I've finished shaping a pan of bagels the first few pass the float test already. I give them a minute or two to rest while I set up the toppings. I boil them for 30-40 seconds per side.

My favorite topping is cheese, I use a four cheese blend of shredded cheese that I get at Sams. My wife likes poppy seeds, with or without sesame seeds, on BOTH sides. (BTW, I've heard that if you eat too many things with poppy seeds on them, it can cause you to fail some drug screening tests for opiates.)

I still haven't tried making sodium carbonate by baking sodium bicarbonate, that's supposed to raise the pH of your poaching liquid from about 8.3 to over 11, and it is safer to use than lye. I usually throw a little honey or barley malt syrup in the poaching liquid along with the baking soda.

We have a number of Middle Eastern ethnic grocery stores and even more Asian ones and one Russian one that I've not been impressed with. I don't recall seeing any flours there.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. And I should have known Caputo was unbleached because they sell it at Whole Foods which doesn't sell bleached or bromated flours. Interestingly it is the least expensive flour there even with all the shipping involved. My family's favorite cake - white cake from "The Cake Bible" calls for cake flour. I had it in the house for that and tested it for pizza to try to simulate the lower gluten flours in Italy before I found anything like Caputo. My family liked result. Since then I've added white whole wheat flour for fiber and flax meal (I prefer red to golden) and chickpea flour to increase fiber and protein. Whole Foods sells Caputo oo and an Italian grocery near my doctor sells semolina but my family (who loved it in Italy) has rejected that here. But maybe I'll try it again.

Many of the bakers here prefer shortcuts. They're doing whatever they can to stay alive, especially if they only have retail customers. Still not sure why it's so hard to find real sourdough since once you have the starter going you just have to maintain it but the none of the local bakeries have it.

Most of our bagels are still NY style but I've seen a few Montreal style popup and they are smaller. They tend to be smaller and sweeter but I have not been to Montreal in years and did not go out of my way to note bagels there the last time I did.

I have taken several drug screen tests that asked if I'd eaten poppy seeds in the last week (some screens go back farther). But the last screen I did (four weeks ago) did not ask me any questions about diet or medications which is interesting. There was a plot in "Seinfeld" where Elaine tested positive for heroin because she ate a poppy seed muffin every day.

[Mike Nolan]

There was a discussion on the BBGA forum the other day that touched on Montreal bagels. We had them in Ottawa and they were great.

It appears they're made without salt, so they're softer than New York style bagels, and they're supposed to be baked in a wood fired oven so they have a smoky flavor.

Failing a drug test due to poppy seeds may be an urban legend enhanced by the Seinfeld episode, but it is interesting that some drug tests do ask that question. I had lunch once in the Soup Kitchen International in NYC that later became famous as a result of Seinfeld. Good soup.

[chocomouse]

After searching the net and a number of my cookbooks (including BBA and ABED), I decided to start with KAF's recipe called simply "Bagels". I made only 2 changes: I cut the salt from 2 to 1 teaspoon. And instead of 4 cups of bread flour, I used 2 of bread flour and 2 of AP (all KAF flours). I used barley malt syrup in the dough and in the boiling water bath. I did not use baking soda in the water bath because the recipe didn't call for it. I prefer smaller bagels, so I made 12 instead of 8 bagels, each weighing 81 grams, just slightly less than the 3 ounces Mike uses.

I'm pleased with the texture and the flavor. It's the wrinkly skin I don't like! But I've been looking more closely at photos online of bagels - and see imperfections in a lot of them, that I never noticed before. So, maybe mine are not so bad after all. I've also watched several UTube videos, and maybe I just need to practice.

Next time - I think I will reduce the boiling time to 30-40 seconds per side, as BakerAunt said Cass suggested. And I'll use brown sugar instead of barley malt syrup. And maybe add some baking soda.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by chocomouse.

[Mike Nolan]

I often use barley malt syrup in bagels, it gives them a light tan color rather than white, but I think it adds a nice flavor.

[Italiancook]

Thanks, Mike, for letting me know Reinhart's recipe is on the web. I appreciate your marbled rye instructions. Maybe there's a loaf of it in my future. I believe I'm up to it now. When I was a newlywed, I really made a mistake trying rye bread before I'd even made a loaf of white bread. I have no idea what I was thinking.

[Mike Nolan]

There are easy bread recipes and harder ones, I always recommend new bakers start out with a few simple ones, like the Clonmel Kitchens Double Crusty bread or the Austrian Malt bread. You can substitute in 1/2 cup of rye flour in either of those to get a light rye without really affecting the recipe.

Over the years I've been inching up the amount of rye flour to bread flour I use in the marbled rye recipe, I've gone as high as 50-50 but I think 40/60 is a little easier to work with.

Here's what the marbled rye looks like when you cut it:

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[Joan Simpson]

Mike your bread looks awesome!

[Mike Nolan]

I had an errand to run on that side of town, so I stopped in at our Whole Foods today to check out their flour selection. No Caputo flour, and not much I can't find closer, either.

But so the trip wasn't a total loss, I stopped at Fareway Meat and ordered a 40 pound box of chicken backs, which should arrive in about two weeks. I'll make one big batch of stock with 10-12 pounds of them and freeze the rest for later batches.

[Italiancook]

Mike, your marbled rye looks scrumptious. So pretty, too. Thanks for the photo. Do you know how it freezes? Do rye breads lose their flavor while in the freezer?

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