We are up on the ranch for the next couple weeks which means I get to cook. It's great because I get to cook; it's less great because conditions are primitive. That's not to say I dislike cooking somewhere where the nearest grocery store is 30 minutes away and doesn't carry fresh basil or even know what gorgonzola is - a freezer of grass fed beef (and moose, elk, goose, pig, salmon, chicken, etc.) makes up for that. It's more that the sharpest knife in the kitchen can't cut through salmon, there are three measuring cups, the teaspoons carbon date to the early 1900s and have no size markings, and there is one quart of yeast, all of it bad. So when I asked if they had yeast I should have asked if the had any from this decade. Needless to say, because the yeast was bad, so were my first batch of bagels - they couldn't past the float test so they ended up in the slop bucket (you're welcome porkers).
Imagine a raw bagel.
Now imagine it at the bottom of a bowl of water.
Now you understand why a picture was unnecessary.
It was a useful exercise in shaping however. Reinhart (see page 74 of artisan breads every day for the bagel recipe I'm using) gives two suggestions for shaping: first is to roll the dough in a ball and then punch your thumbs through to make e bagel shape; second is to roll the dough out into a rope and then wet the ends and work the seam together. The first method is much easier, but the second produces nicer looking shapes (even though I need more practice), so I'll be sticking with method number 2 for future attempts.
method #1
method #2
- jmb
