Last weekend we went to New York to visit some friends for my birthday. There are plenty of things I miss about living in the bog apple — pals, music, affordable housing — but nothing I miss as much as a good bagel. Like most NY trips, I had a full itinerary of binge eating and I saved the creme de la creme of Bergen Bagels for very last. Unfortunately for me, their toaster was broken. I returned home feeling a little jilted, the thought of the perfect lox bagel still nagging at my stomach strings.

We decided to make Peter Reinhart’s Bagels from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  It’s a fun time.  People always seem to be really impressed if you make bagels, but they’re really not much tougher than bread.  There’s some tricky parts though.  Sometimes you forget that you’re out of capers.  Sometimes you have non-diastatic malt powder and your recipe calls for diastatic malt powder.  Sometimes you can’t find high gluten flour and don’t have time to look at several stores (next time you see wheat gluten on its own buy it and fortify the bread flour [ I think. someone correct me if buying the high gluten flour is better than doing that]). And sometimes your mixer breaks and you have to knead the dough by hand at three in the morning when you just want to go to bed and f bagels f them to h.

It is fun though, and these aren’t real problems.  Capers : you cry a little and keep better stock of what you have, high gluten flour : use bread flour, Reinhart says they’ll be less chewy than full gluten bagels,  malt powder: use it anyway, you’ll have less enzymatic breakdown of the starches, but it’ll still taste good, mixer breaking:  remember that kneading is a peaceful and relaxing experience.   One thing the recipe doesn’t mention : angelic glows  when you take them out of the oven.   You’ve got to look at them and smell bagel air for 15 minutes before you eat them.  That’s probably the hardest part.  Although that’s about the same for all of the recipes in the book.

The bagels were very very good.  The inside was chewy, which really complemented the flavors that developed as you chewed.  They’re crusty, in that great bagely sort of chewy way. Just the way that most bagels disappointingly aren’t.   The everything ones did seem more salt balanced.  I topped them with a mix of seeds and salt.  I wonder if the salt is a little low for my taste, or assuming a salty sprinkle.  It’s 2% though,  so I also wonder if I put in an airier salt when I made the dough.  I dont think I salted by weight (don’t tell).   They were best 15 minutes out of the oven.  We also ate some toasted 2 days after and they were still very good. None lasted longer than that.  If you keep them in the fridge to cook some after two days make sure they’re well covered or they’ll get hard spots.  It’s more a disappointment than a deal breaker, that batch went pretty fast too.

Here I am thinking about bagels in the bog apple.

Maggie must have smelled some bagels at the bottom of the stairwell.

I think Alaina is eyeing  up a bagel sitting on my left shoulder.

This is what we at the the Robeling Tea Room.  Not bagels, but very good.

I think he just lost his last bagel in a bet.  So sad.