Chew on this

Yes, it´s that time of the month again, but there´s no pastry cream this time, I kid you not, not even puff pastry or cream puffs. Have the Daring Bakers gone completely mad, you ask, no I say, it´s just that simple was the way to go this time around, and boy are we glad about it.

Now, you must think of the word “easy” in Daring-Bakers terms of course, because what we made was bagels from scratch.

I was totally into it right from the get go because, as some of you might have realized, I´m up for anything bread-like these days, and I´ve been meaning to try making bagels for ages now.

The problem was that my only bagel-eating experiences were a plain bagel on a Delta plane (which, surprisingly, I loved, though then again, I don´t think the palate is truly demanding at 7am after 10 hours on a plane, I´d do anything just to be distracted for a little while… ok, you need to cleanse your mind here, not that kind of anything on a plane, at least not so far!)… where was I? Yes, bagels, well, the other bagels I had tried were supermarket blueberry bagels (shudder!). In my defense, my ex boyfriend bought them and he didn´t seem to have a very refined sense in terms of food (though he did have a wonderful taste in women, of course).

So needless to say, I´m not sure if I have the right parameters to judge my bagel-making efforts. I mean they were quite chewy, but apparently they are supposed to be like that, and the toppings were nice, and they took like 3 hours to make overall, which is like nothing.

I did a bunch of different toppings: black sesame seeds, regular sesame seeds, poppy seeds, parmesan cheese, parmesan cheese with a taco mix, parmesan cheese with garlic flakes (do you see a trend here?), sea salt, and mixes of the previous toppings. My favorites were the sesame seed and, surprise surprise, the parmesan-taco bagels.

As you can see in this picture, when I tried the “snake” method of bagel-making, it didn´t work all too well. But as I always tell myself when things come out funny-looking, they are “rustic” bagels… yeah, right!

As for the veredict, I don´t have a clear one… I liked the bagels, but I think they were a bit bready, though I think I´ll just have to go to New York, try the real deal and then compare. I know, my life is full of sacrifices.

For the recipe, click here. And remember to check out the other Daring Bakers creations in the Link Madness page above.