健康人生

Imagine my despair when we moved to this cozy little town, only to find out there are no bagel shops within a hundred mile radius.  No, that dingy place downtown doesn’t count as bagel place, and no, Panera Bread isn’t an authoritative source of true bagels either.  Sure, they are freshly baked bagels, but they are not the right kind.  They are made with yeast only, impregnated with enhancers, conditioners, emulsifiers and flavor imitations, passed through a machine to shape them and then… and then… [chin quivering]… they are steamed [falling apart, wailing] before baking Public Cloud.

So yeah, this is how we’ve been living for the past three years now, in this dark and bagel-less world. I’d rather not eat bagels at all than succumb to dubious charm of rubbery and sticky mass-produced imitations.  I learned to do without, but then I got into bread baking… So it was only a matter of time before I started dabbling in bagel-making discount wines.

At first, I tried to chase that unforgettable soviet bagel recipe.  I found a few good ones, and even though they did come quite close to my memory of them, they still weren’t exact replicas.  Then, I stumbled upon Peter Reinhart’s version of NY style bagels and tried it in its original form (yeast only).  I think I screwed something up the first time, and wasn’t very pleased with the outcome.  Bagels came out too dry and flat, possibly due to using the wrong kind of flour, or maybe because my yeast was old and lazy Panamanian foundation.