[Mike Nolan]

Dinner tonight was Kraft macaroni and cheese. My wife likes it plain, I add ground beef and mushroom soup after dishing hers out.

[Mike Nolan]

No, I always use baking soda in the water bath, but sometimes I also put in some honey or barley syrup too.

One of these days I'm going to bake a tray full of baking soda to make sodium carbonate as suggested by a NY Times article some years back. This produces a stronger alkaline solution than sodium bicarbonate, but not nearly as strong as lye, which is not easy to find in stores and requires careful handling.

Sodium bicarbonate is interesting, because according to Quora the pH is going to be around 8.35 regardless of how much you add to the water. (That's usually not the case.) The practical use of that information is that you don't have to add a lot of sodium bicarbonate to your poaching liquid for bagels to get full effect.

By comparison, the pH of a sodium carbonate solution will probably be somewhere between 11 and 12, since for sodium carbonate the pH does vary depending on how much you add to the water. And the pH of a solution of lye in water can be as high as 13, which is why it needs to be handled carefully. (I would probably handle a sodium carbonate solution more carefully than one made with sodium bicarbonate, too.)

The major difference between the bagel recipes in BBA and ABED is that the one in BBA produces about 1.5 times as much dough. I usually make the ABED one these days, since there are just 2 of us.

[Mike Nolan]

Welcome back!

[Mike Nolan]

I've made bagels dozens of times. I generally use one of Peter Reinhart's recipes, either the one in BBA or in ABED.

I have only made cinnamon-raisin bagels a few times, but they didn't seem tougher or denser than 'plain' bagels.

As for toppings, my wife likes them with poppy seeds (and sometimes some sesame seeds too), I tend to prefer them topped with a 4 cheese blend or plain.

I generally use the 'poke a hole in the middle' method, I find that works better than the traditional 'wrap around your hand' method, especially since I prefer bagels made with 3 ounces of dough per bagel rather than the 4 or 4.5 ounces many recipes use, and I have pretty big hands.

You need to do a good job of rolling the bagels into compact balls. I then let them rest for a few minutes. I flatten them into discs, let those rest for another minute or two and then poke the hole in the middle and stretch them a bit, making sure the dough is fairly even all the way around. (When our granddaughter is visiting, she loves doing this part.) By then they're ready for their bath.

I really prefer using barley syrup to using nondiastatic malt powder, and sometimes I put a little barley syrup in the boiling water, too.

[Mike Nolan]

Date sugar is an ingredient you're more likely to see at a store that specializes in mid-eastern or Indian foods, although Bob's Red Mill also sells it. (But they sell a lot of products that most stores don't stock.)

I saw an online article yesterday about cooking with maple syrup or maple sugar, it had one recipe that used a cup and a half of maple sugar!

[Mike Nolan]

My grandmother was German, she used a lot of ground cloves when cooking meats. I find cloves can be overpowering, more so than nutmeg or allspice.

[Mike Nolan]

Our older son has used a couple of those services, although he's a pretty good cook from scratch.

[Mike Nolan]

We had tuna salad sandwiches.

[Mike Nolan]

They closed Interstate 80 yesterday from around Grand Island to the western Omaha suburbs, and they haven't said when it'll be reopened. If you look at the cameras on I-80, at least one of them shows a semi across the middle of the roadway. On the news last night some of the accidents looked incredible, dozens of vehicles, mostly semis.

Our niece was visiting her mother and they're hoping to head for home (Des Moines) some time today, but even in Iowa travel is still 'not recommended'.

We think we got about 10 inches of snow here. Our driveway is still being dug out, but the street hasn't been plowed yet (we're on a bus route so we get plowed even when they don't do the residential streets), but we're not planning to go anywhere today.

[Mike Nolan]

The article says that the researchers destroyed 12 microwave ovens doing the research.

[Mike Nolan]

Tonight we're having meatballs in marinara with mushrooms and cheese toast.

I'll post my meatball recipe tomorrow.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm making Vienna Bread today, plus another batch of custard.

[Mike Nolan]

I made this a second time, using a little less water. It still seemed a bit slack, so I did two stretch and folds to add some structure, and I baked it another 3 minutes (total of 48.)

Here's a slice:

[Mike Nolan]

For a 100% whole wheat bread, it's a fairly open crumb. Here's a slice. (Keep in mind that this was made in an 8" loaf pan, not a one-pound pan):

[Mike Nolan]

I made the 100% whole wheat bread that you do in the food processor again. I used a little less water this time, it still seemed a little slack after the bulk rise so I did a couple of stretch and folds before putting it in the 8" bread pan. The final rise took less than an hour. It did not collapse this time. I'm baking it for 48 rather than 45 minutes because it didn't seem quite done in the center last time.

I'll let you know how it came out after it is cool enough to slice but it smells great again.

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