Bye gulls!

The title of this post might seem a little odd, but it stems from a discussion I had recently about the correct spelling and pronunciation of bagels. If you live in east London, it’s likely that they’ll be referred to as “beigels”, pronounced ‘bye-gulls’, which is said by locals to be the authentic spelling. “Bagel” (pronounced ‘bay-gull’) is purported, by east Londoners and others, to be an Americanised spelling. However, I have been told by plenty of people in various parts of the UK that they have only ever known this latter spelling. As the original Yiddish word is “beygl”, I reckon that either spelling is fair game. Whatever you call them, bagels have been a bread success story of the 20th century.

Thought to have their origins in Poland in the 1600s, bagels were taken across Europe, to the UK and to the USA by Polish migrants in the late 19th century. Now they are widely available in plain and flavoured varieties – raisin, cinnamon, sesame, poppy seed and onion are probably the most common –­ but all share the dense texture and smooth, chewy crust. Supermarkets give over notable shelf space to them, and a host of outlets have sprung up that toast and fill bagels to order with a wide choice of fillings. The Beigel Bake shop in London’s Brick Lane is a must-do on the tourist attraction lists. People have even gone to the trouble of designing dedicated kitchen gadgetry.

I really enjoy bagels for breakfast and am generally happy to buy the supermarket ones. Having improved my bread-making skills over the past year, however, I thought I would have a go at making them. They hold some mystery because they are boiled before baking, which seems a strange thing to do to bread. This step is, though, remarkably simple and helps to give the exterior it’s slightly leathery finish and beautiful golden colour. I looked around for recipes, which seem to vary quite a lot. Some were rich, including eggs, butter, malt syrup or honey, but some seemed more like straightforward bread recipes. I gather the recipes fall into two main categories in North America: Montreal-style bagels are made from sweet, rich dough and are often flavoured with sesame or poppy seeds, whereas for New York-style bagels the dough is less rich and they have no added flavourings or toppings.

After looking in my store cupboard, I opted for fewer ingredients, thinking that would be simpler. The first couple of attempts, though, were real flops ­– literally! I had the balance of yeast to flour wrong and the dough over-proved, meaning that the bagels completely collapsed during baking. With a bit of tweaking, I came up with a formula that yields consistently good results. I have provided this recipe below along with a tutorial.

You will see that I’ve mentioned the bagels may be kept uncooked in the fridge overnight. The science suggests that this process enables development of long, strongly cross-linked gluten strands without letting the dough over-prove. This is said to improve the texture and flavour of the finished bagels. I have, however, tried my recipe with and without refrigeration, and I didn’t notice much difference, so I would employ this approach for convenience as much as anything else. Convenience is certainly the reason behind the other frequently cited reason for refrigeration, which is that Jews could prepare the bagels before the Sabbath began, avoid partaking in prohibited cooking activities during it, and the bagels would be ready to cook when it was finished. Either way, refrigeration does mean that baking bagels can fit into even tight time schedules, so that makes them a winner for me.

Give them a go.

Making a wholemeal of it

It’s been a couple of weeks or so since my last post. I took some time out over the Easter break to entertain visitors, plant up new window boxes and generally have a relaxing time. I’ve also been doing a little baking experimentation. Before making the pitta breads described in my post It's a pitta I didn't try this earlier I did quite a lot of research into recipes. Many of them indicated that plain or strong flour could be used. The use of plain flour seemed a little odd to me, but if you’ve been following this blog you’ll know my knowledge and experience of bread-making, although growing, remain somewhat limited. Overall, therefore, since pitta are flatbreads and the yeast-to-flour ratio is high, I concluded that the type of flour would not be as relevant as it would for a pan loaf.

I had bought a bag of wholemeal self-raising flour for a recipe that I ended up not using and I didn’t want it to go to waste. When I buy pitta breads from the shop, I frequently prefer wholemeal ones. Taking the information at face value, therefore, I tried out my recipe with this flour; if the difference between strong and weak didn’t matter, I figured that the difference between self-raising and plain flour wouldn’t matter here either.

If you like your pittas to resemble large thin oatcakes, this is definitely the recipe for you! They tasted lovely, but the dough was hard and difficult to knead, there was not even an inkling of a rise and there was not a chance in Hell of splitting the finished breads to fill them. Perhaps I should have donated them to the Olympic Games discus competitors…

I thought perhaps that using half wholemeal and half strong white flour would solve the problem. Indeed, it did improve things a little, and the bread ended up a little lighter, but remained almost impossible to split, having few air pockets and a slightly crumbly texture.

Finally, I just went right out there and bought some strong brown flour. From the word go the dough felt different – smoother, lighter, more elastic and more malleable. The pittas came out delightfully soft and easy to split. One thing of note, though, was that they didn’t puff up in the oven quite as impressively as the white ones did. Rather, they developed multiple large air bubbles. When reheated, though, these popped back up and the small areas in between offered only slight resistance so they were still easy to split. My conclusion, therefore, is that pittas do need to be made with strong flour to be able to hold any rise achieved. I have amended the tutorial posted in It's a pitta I didn't try this earlier to reflect this finding.

But what to do with the bag of self-raising wholemeal flour? Well, as I had some lemons in the fridge, I created the recipe below for lemon and pine nut muffins. These were much more successful than the self-raising-flour pitta breads and go rather well with a cup of tea and a good book!

Lemon and pine nut muffins

125 g plain white flour

125 g wholemeal flour

100 g caster sugar

3 tsp baking powder

Half tsp salt

175 ml milk

75 ml vegetable oil

1 egg

Rind and juice of 2 lemons

75 g pine nuts

Heat the oven to 200ºC/400ºF/gas mark 6. Grease a 12-muffin baking tray or line it with paper bun cases. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, lemon rind and salt. In a separate bowl beat together the milk, oil, egg and lemon juice. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir gently until the dry ingredients are moistened, but do not beat; the mixture should remain lumpy. Gently stir in the pine nuts. Fill each bun case 3/4 full and bake for 20–25 min or until a cocktail stick inserted in the centre comes out clean and the cakes feel firm. Leave to cool on a cooling rack.

It's a pitta I didn't try this earlier

I like pitta breads. They are a good size for when you want some bread and a filling but when a two-slice sandwich feels a little over-facing. In the past I have always bought them, but I figured they can't be difficult to make. Indeed, a little research suggested they are exceedingly simple, and the practice confirms they are.

The making the dough and the cooking parts are very, very quick, so it's just the proving for a couple of hours that takes the time. I recommend these if you're having a barbecue or perhaps for hors d'oeuvre - just for a little more of an 'I did that' factor.

I've done a pictorial tutorial below for you to cut out and keep.

Enjoy! 

The proof is in the proving

Well, it’s been a busy couple of weeks, hence the lack of posts. My part-time hours have been stretching their boundaries, and I was put rather behind by my computer contracting an annoying virus. Thus, the domestic side of life has been taking a bit of a back seat.

When I finally did manage to get to the shop – a necessity as we were running out of a multitude of things – I forgot to buy bread. Rather than pop out again, though, I decided to re-try making bread rolls. If you’ve read my post on leavened bread you will know that in the past this has not been entirely successful. In view of fairing better with naan bread recently, though, I felt all was not lost. I do try to take the stand that I will be able to do things if I just persevere.

Admittedly, the bread maker did the hard work, but it’s not that bit I’m afraid of, so it’s neither here nor there to me if I hand it over to my mechanical friend. It’s the final proving that prevents my rolls from being more like dense lumps with high missile potential than easy-to-eat, tasty buns. I tried my new trick of slightly warming the oven the turning it off, and popped in a tray of rolls. Well, I should have been more optimistic, as I put all six on one tray and they rose so much some of them merged together! Happy, Happy days. I felt as proud as punch when the baking yielded a batch that was uniformly decent in size and light in weight.

The final seal of approval came from my husband, the delectable Mr M, who, astonished at the difference in these rolls from my previous effort, felt compelled to email me directly from lunching at the office with “excellent rolls!” I think I might finally have cracked it.

As a final note, if you like brown bread I thoroughly recommend the Allinson Country Grain bread flour I used.

To make, to bake, to buy: leavened bread

Various food staples or low-cost foods are time consuming to make and have ready-made versions readily available. I have often wondered, though, whether I should be making them more, both in number and frequency. I have pulled together a few thoughts on this topic in a series of entries. Here’s the first, which deals with my experiences with leavened bread.

Yeast has always been something of a nemesis for me. Some of my handmade loaves of bread have been so dense they could have been used as deadly weapons. I did make a vaguely lightweight loaf of cheese bread once but I seriously think that was a fluke. My attempt at foccacia went OK, but that doesn’t really have to get very tall, which I think was the secret behind my success.

I know the theory, a tad of the science, and how to knead, thanks to home economics lessons at school. I have also received many a hint and tip from successful bread bakers, but in my hands, dough is put to sleep rather than brought to life. I think a major hindrance has been that in the absence of an airing cupboard—the loss of immersion heaters must be becoming more widespread in the age of combination boilers—I haven’t been able to find an alternative spot warm enough to prove the dough well. Balancing the dough container on top of the radiator just doesn’t cut it.

My mother saved the day. After listening to my tales of woe she bought me a bread-making machine. I have many things for which to thank my mother, but this features pretty highly. At last I can create light, tasty bread at home. There’s nothing like a sandwich made on super soft, barely cooled, bread. Plus, with the delay setting, if I remember to put the ingredients in at night, I can wake up to the smell of baking.

Machine-made bread does, however, have a few oddities that amuse me. The loaves often come out of the pan a like a square pannetone, taller than they are long. This trompe l’oeil, especially when the loaf is brown, means I have to keep reminding myself that ham won’t clash with the candied peel. Even more confusing, the flavour is also slightly sweet. I use the recipes provided by the machine manufacturers, which they claim are designed to optimise results in their machines.  An ingredient in quite a lot of the recipes is milk powder. Not only might this impart the distinctive flavour to my machine-made bread, but neither my mother nor I can work out its exact purpose. I’m sure some tweaking the recipes would be possible, but I haven’t tried this yet. In view of my lack of success with bread, though, I’m not really confident enough to know what to change. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has successfully changed them. Finally, the paddle that kneads the dough frequently gets stuck inside the cooked loaf. It’s easy enough to get out once the loaf has cooled, but a funny dent is left in several slices, and if you forget to remove it, hitting it with the bread knife can be a little disturbing!

The machine leaflet also comes with recipes for dough for smaller or shaped breads, such as bread rolls, pizza bases, French bread etc, which it kneads and proves before you remove the dough to shape it. So, this brings me full circle to the proving problem, as a rising stage for this or other dough I make by hand, such as for naan, is required after shaping. I have a double oven, so tried proving bread rolls in the top oven while the bottom oven was on. It helped a bit, but not much. My new solution, tried out yesterday, is to heat the oven to the lowest temperature for a little while, turn it off and leave the dough in there for several hours while it cools. This seemed to work quite well, as I thought my naan dough might get out of control it increased in size so much! I will definitely be trying this out more in the future and will report on my experiences anon.

The only major downside to a bread machine is the size. It takes up quite a lot of work surface if left out, but fitting it in a cupboard might also be tricky. If it does end up in a cupboard there’s the risk of out of sight, out of mind! Owing to various recent house refurbishments, mine is currently balanced on a hamper with a load of junk on top of it. The next bit of work on the house, though, will be a new kitchen, and when we were designing it we ensure there would be plenty of work space to have it available for use at all times, that’s how much I love it! So, I think that for loaves I will never return to the handmade method, but for some things, such as naan—and I’m thinking about trying pitta soon—there might be hope.