I love cooking with yeast. Since Priscilla arrived it is easier as her dough hook makes it a breeze. But it still amazes me! You can’t get fresh yeast in Cairns. Well not bakers yeast anyway. I suspect we would have the climate to do a proper sour dough starter and I will try that one of these days, but until then I use the easy blend dried stuff.

These bagels are Nigella’s recipe:

1 kg of white flour, plus more as necessary for kneading.
1 tbspn of salt
7g of easy yeast or 15g of fresh yeast
2 tbspns of sugar
1 tbspn vegetable oil, plus more for greasing
500mL warm water, plus more as needed
2 tbspns of malt or sugar, for poaching the bagels
2-3 baking sheets, oiled or greased.

Combine the flour, salt and yeast together in a large bowl, add the sugar and the oil to the water. Make a well in the dry ingredients and add the liquid, mixing to a dough with a spatula or wooden spoon. (or do as I do and just add it all to the bowl of the mixer!)

Knead the dough either by hand or with dough hook, trying to add more flour if you can, dough is better drier than wetter, the dough will be stiff and hard work, even with the dough hook it takes 10 minutes.

Form the dough into a ball and put it into an oiled bowl, turning once to coat all around, then cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave it to rise for 1 hour. It should be well risen, and when you poke it with your finger , the impression should remain.

Punch the dough down and then give a good knead and divinde into 3 pieces. Using your hands, roll each piece into a rope then cut each rope into 5 pieces. Roll each piece between the palmns of your hands into a ball and then roll into another rope, curling to form ring. Seal the ends by overlapping.

Put on a large pan of water to boil, when it boils add the malt or the sugar.

Sit the bagels on the baking sheets cover with tea towels and leave for 20 minutes by which times they should be puffy. Preheat oven to 240C.

When the water is boiling, start poaching, drop a couple of bagels at a time into the bioling water and boil for 1 minute turning them once, use a couple of spatulas for this.

As you poach them put them back onto the oiled baking sheets (yes this is important as I forgot to oil the sheets and they stuck!) well spaced and then bake for 10-15 minutes until they’re shiny and golden brown.

Makes 15 Bagels.

Appropriate doing Jewish cooking on Good Friday? Doesn’t worry me anyway! Was going to do hot ? buns with the x replaced by a ? but I have run out of flour! Might leave that for another day!

Tags: bagels, Cooking, yeast

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.