Cinnamon Raisin Bagels

There are a few things we've gained since moving back to the west coast. Perfect weather, for example. Good mexican food. Beaches that can actually be enjoyed. On the other hand, there are plenty of things we miss. The walk-ability of the city. Reasonable public transportation. And all types of food; mostly though, pizza and bagels.

I've covered my attempts to recreate the thin crust pizzas of New York City. So far I haven't been successful, but its a work in progress. I've made quite a few pizzas so far and, although they aren't anything like what can be had in Brooklyn, you certainly won't hear me complaining about all the pizzas I've had to eat along the way.

Which brings us to bagels. The bagels in NYC are incredible. There was a corner store just down the street from our old apartment that made bagels fresh, every morning. If we were up early enough we could smell them from our balcony - but we were very rarely up at 4am! 

These bagels were just one of the hundreds of bagel offerings throughout the boroughs - served warm, with a large schmear of cream cheese. After New York bagels, its hard to find a good substitute. So I did what any good food blogger would do - I tried to make my own.

We are an open-bagel household; we love all kinds. Bagels have their place: everything or onion bagels for sandwiches, plain bagels for lox, etc etc. Our favorite bagel, though, is the cinnamon raisin. Its the perfect amount of sweet for breakfast and is good with cream cheese, butter, or even peanut butter. When it was time to decide what kind of bagel I would be making, cinnamon raisin was an easy choice.

Cinnamon Raisin Bagels

Adapted from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice

Sponge
1 teaspoon instant yeast
4 cups unbleached high-gluten or bread flour
2 1/2 cups water, room temperature

Dough
1 teaspoon instant yeast
3 3/4 cups unbleached high-gluten or bread flour
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
5 tablespoons sugar
2 3/4 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons malt powder or 1 tablespoon dark or light malt syrup, honey, or brown sugar
2 cups loosely packed raisins, rinsed with warm water to remove surfact sugar, acid, and natural wild yeast

To Finish
1 tablespoon baking soda
Cornmeal or semolina flour for dusting
Melted butter for brushing (optional)
Cinnamon sugar for sprinkling (optional)

First, make the sponge. Mix the yeast and flour in a large mixing bowl. Add the water, stirring only until it forms a smooth, sticky batter. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and leave at room temperature for 2 hours, or until it becomes foamy and bubbly. The sponge should double in size and collapse when the bowl is tapped.

To make the dough, add the rest of the yeast to the sponge and stir. Add all but 1/2 to 1 cup of the flour, and all of the cinnamon, sugar, salt and malt. Mix on low speed with the dough hook until the ingredients form a ball, then slowly work in the remaining flour until the dough is stiff. Add the raisins at the end of mixing.

Transfer the dough to a countertop and knead for at least 10 minutes. The dough should be firm, but still smooth and pliable. If the dough is too dry or rips, add a few drops of water and continue kneading. If the dough is tacky or sticky, add more flour. The kneaded dough should feel satiny and pliable but not be tacky.

Immediately divide the dough into equal pieces - 12 (4 1/2 ounce) pieces for super sized bagels, 16 (3.375 ounce) regular-sized bagels, or 24 (2.25 ounce) perfectly smaller bagels. Form the pieces into rolls.

Cover the rolls with a damp towel and rest for 20 minutes.

Line 2 sheet pans with parchment paper and lightly spray with oil. Poke a hole in the center of a ball of dough and rotate your thumb to widen the hole. The dough should be stretched as evenly possible around the bagel.

Place the shaped pieces two inches apart on the pans. Mist the bagels lightly with spray oil and cover each pan loosely with plastic wrap. Let sit at room temperature for 20 minutes.

Check to see if the bagels are ready by using the “float test”. Fill a bowl with cool to room-temperature water. The bagels are ready if they float within 10 seconds of being put into the water. Take a bagel and test it. If it floats, return the bagel to the pan, dry it, then cover the pan and put it in the refrigerator overnight. If it does not float, return the bagel to the pan and continue to proof the dough at room temperature. Check the dough every 10 minutes or so until a tester floats

 The following day preheat the oven to 500°F with both racks in the middle of the oven. Boil a large pot of water and add the baking soda. Sprinkle parchment-lined sheet pans with cornmeal or semolina flour.

Remove the bagels from the refrigerator and gently drop them into the water, boiling only as many as comfortably fit. They should float within 10 seconds. After 1 minute, flip them over and boil for another minute.

Place the boiled bagels back on the pans and bake for five minutes, then rotate the pans 180-degrees. Lower the oven temperature to 450°F and bake for another 5 minutes, or until the bagels are light golden brown.

Remove the bagels from the oven and let cool on a rack before serving.

Challah for Rosh Hashanah

Challah has been on my to-make list for a long while. When the Mister and I started dating he introduced me to challah french toast and I've been hooked ever since. Because he is not particularly observant we usually only have a loaf around the holidays, and my yummy french toast is a special occasion treat.

Last year at this time I worked in an area with a large Jewish population. There was a bakery that I had heard good things about, so I decided to get our holiday loaves there. The day before Rosh Hashanah I stopped by on my lunch break and found a line out the door and around the corner - there was no way I was going to get back to work on time. Luckily, a patient of ours recognized my scrubs and not only let me cut ahead of her in line, but also bought me two loaves of bread!

This year, both to cross an item off my list AND to avoid that line, I decided to make my own challah. I roughly followed a recipe from The Complete American Jewish Cookbook, which has been my lifesaver as the main cook in a half-Jewish household. One change I did make was to add raisins, and I didn't braid the loaf as is tradition at Rosh Hashanah.

The loaf came out very pretty. It was really fun to make and even more fun to cut into and enjoy as a part of our Rosh Hashanah celebration. (PS - Challah + honey = yum) I'm really excited to make it again, and to try braiding.

Shana Tovah!

Challah

2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup hot milk
3/4 tbsp sugar
3/4 tsp salt
2 1/4 tsp yeast
1/4 cup lukewarm water
2 eggs, 1 yolk reserved
3 cups flour
1 cup raisins

Melt the butter in the milk. Pour into a large mixing bowl. Add sugar and salt and let cool to lukewarm.

Meanwhile, dissolve the yeast in the water. Let stand until yeast has activated. Mix in 1 full egg and 1 white, then pour into milk mixture and mix well.

Slowly pour in flour, mixing well. Knead until smooth and elastic (I used my mixer; the book says it should take about 5 minutes). Place dough in a large greased bowl and cover with a cloth. Let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, 1 to 2 hours.

After the rise, punch the dough down. Flatten into a rectangular shape and pour raisins down the center. Fold top of dough over and pinch edges shut.

Roll the dough into a long rope. Coil the rope into a 9" cake pan or pie pan. Cover and let rise for 1 hour, until puffy and full.

Whisk the reserved egg yolk with 1 tbsp cold water. Using a pastry brush, lightly cover the dough with the egg wash.

Bake at 375 for 30 to 45 minutes, or until the loaf sounds hollow when tapped. Tent with aluminum foil if loaf becomes too brown.

No-Knead Bread from the New York Times

I don't know why I waited so long to try this.

I bought a dutch oven a few months ago, and so far I've used it for a lot of really delicious things. I've made meat, I've made sauces, I've made entire dinners in the thing, and they've all come out very well. But until now I hadn't made the one thing I really, really wanted to make: bread.

The No-Knead Bread recipe from the NYT has been making the rounds in the blog world since it printed in 2006, and I'm sure pretty much every one came out perfectly. The recipe is easy to follow and the technique is minimal. I was so happy with how this bread came out - crunchy brown crust, soft and holey crumb. And so tasty. Man, I love bread.

I had only one complaint with how my bread turned out, and I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with the recipe. As usual, I think the humidity in my apartment did me no favors with my loaf. While the outside was crunchy the inside was a little moist, more so than I would have liked. Life is hard when you live so close to the beach, right?


No-Knead Bread
Adapted from the New York Times
Adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting

¼ teaspoon instant yeast
1¼ teaspoons salt
Cornmeal or wheat bran as needed.

In a large bowl combine flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 5/8 cups water, and stir until blended; dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let dough rest at least 12 hours, preferably about 18, at warm room temperature, about 70 degrees.

Dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it; sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest about 15 minutes.

Using just enough flour to keep dough from sticking to work surface or to your fingers, gently and quickly shape dough into a ball. Generously coat a cotton towel (not terry cloth) with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal; put dough seam side down on towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another cotton towel and let rise for about 2 hours. When it is ready, dough will be more than double in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

At least a half-hour before dough is ready, heat oven to 450 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) in oven as it heats. When dough is ready, carefully remove pot from oven. Slide your hand under towel and turn dough over into pot, seam side up; it may look like a mess, but that is O.K. Shake pan once or twice if dough is unevenly distributed; it will straighten out as it bakes. Cover with lid and bake 30 minutes, then remove lid and bake another 15 to 30 minutes, until loaf is beautifully browned. Cool on a rack.

Banana Bread

We all have one: a go-to recipe for Banana Bread. Whenever I see a few sad looking bananas browning on my countertop I know I can dig through my mom's recipe folder and find my family's recipe, the same one that my grandmother taught my mom how to make. Except this time, with these sad looking bananas, that tattered piece of paper was about 2500 miles away (and my mother is notorious for not picking up/returning phone calls) and I had to go looking for a new recipe.

I had a few important constraints when looking for a recipe, namely in ingredients. I had 3 bananas, half a stick of butter, and absolutely no motivation to go to the store. Besides the normal cast of characters this recipe calls for plain yogurt - genius! - giving it a nice moist texture.






Banana Bread



Original Recipe found here


2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter, softened
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups mashed ripe banana (about 3 bananas)
1/3 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Cooking spray


Preheat oven to 350°.

Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine the flour, baking soda, and salt, stirring with a whisk.
Place sugar and butter in a large bowl, and beat with a mixer at medium speed until well blended (about 1 minute). Add the eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition.
Add banana, yogurt, and vanilla; beat until blended.
Add flour mixture; beat at low speed just until moist. Spoon batter into an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch loaf pan coated with cooking spray.
Bake at 350° for 1 hour or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes in pan on a wire rack; remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack.