flour choice for bagels?

High gluten bread flour or the addition of 10% vital gluten to A/P flour.=

If you are not using commercial quantities, check King Arthur Com

But in other parts of the country, they forget to boil the bagels before =

baking too.

--=20 Sincerly,

C=3D=A6-)=A7 H. W. Hans Kuntze, CMC, S.g.K. (_o_)

, snipped-for-privacy@cmcchef.com"Don't cry because it's over, Smile because it Happened"_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/=20

Yes, you will need a high gluten flour. Rumor has it the taste/texture from a New York Bagel is because they are boiled in NY city water.

tgt

High gluten, unbleached, unbromated flour. I use Knoxbridge and love it.

There are great bagels to be found in many many places. I've had them in Florida and in California and lots of other places over the years. Boiled or steamed, done correctly, they can be great.

The biggest issue is that most people from outside the New York area don't know a bagel from Wonderbread, so they just buy what's in the basket. The same holds true for Kaiser rolls, french and italian breads and lots more.

In many areas, most people buy their "fresh baked bread" from Wal-Mart, where absolutely everything feels and tastes like a week old hotdog roll.

As far as the "it's the water" issue, that's just a rumor kicked around by people who have perhaps tasted good bagels and know nothing else about them. "Oh yeah, must be the water..., makes sense to me."

Nevermind that the baker adds 50% more yeast for free volume and uses the cheapest flour available, and that he learned to bake from the owners nephew who hated working there and now sits in an office cubicle trying to dart pencils in the ceiling tiles.

"Gee, Mr. Scruggs, these bagels aren't as good as the ones I bought in New York..."

"Well, I make 'em the same, Bubba, it's jes that the goldang water here is different. Cain't be hay-elped."

I even once heard of "some great bagel shop in West Palm Beach where they truck their water in from New York, just to make great bagels." Sure, and they sell for $1.98 each, right?

Dave

I know that several bagel places around here ("Here" being Chatham-Summit-Millburn, NJ) which make great bagels use General Mills All Trumps flour. I assume that you could do the same with just about any bread flour. If you need a flour like this is commercial quantities, call a local restaurant supply house or wholesale grocer. A lot of them will allow you to buy from them is you don't get in the way.

I know that Dawn Foods in Edison, NJ, has a Will Call arrangement. You call up, tell them what you want and when you want it. They get it ready for you, you pay for it and load it in your car. I assume that other sources have similar arrangements. I can buy 50 pounds of All Trumps or Harvest King for around $12.

Barry

Not difficult to choose. ALWAYS choose a very high gluten flour (or add gluten to lower gluten flour). I always use WheatMontana, the very highest gluten available flour (I believe) in the States. Check out their website for store nearest you.

Our Costco sells the All Trumps flour and I believe that I have seen it at Sam's Club also.

I sure wish my Costco sold it. All I can find at our Costco, Hanover, NJ, is a "Bread flour" that has a gluten/protein of 10-11%.

Barry

"barry" wrote in news:qrjqb.38$ snipped-for-privacy@news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net:

If you can find All Trumps... this is the best I have found for a great robust flavor and has protein level of 14%. Puros has a will call ability, and so does Dawn Foods. Most suppliers are willing to sell to the public now a days due to the lagging economy. If you can't find a supplier, go to GM website and ask them for a lead.

Scott

And probably bleached, too.

The GM web site lists versions of ALL Trumps, both bromated & unbromated. It is an interesting page with specs for their bakers' flours.

I've been using this site for a couple of years now. As far as I know, it's the only flour web site that lists the spec sheet for a company's flours. A lot of companies make claims for their flour, but this is the only spec sheet I've seen.

Barry

That's about the level of protein that the regular King Arthur flour has. KA sells a Sir Lancelot bread flour that's over 14% gluten, and they recommend using a heavy duty mixer to knead it so the full gluten potential is developed.

Cindy

It's not forgetting, Hans, they don't know to do it. We walked into a bagel place here in Seattle a few months ago and noticed the bagels looked a little puffy. When we asked the kid behind the counter whether the bagels were boiled before baking he looked at us as if we were from Mars.

Cindy

No, it's worse than that. They don't want to boil the bagels. Many people don't like things they have to chew, to struggle to eat. The found that if they don't boil the bagels, they rise up more, they are lighter, and they aren't chewy.

Of course, at this point the also aren't really bagels. At least, not authentic bagels. But they may be more popular bagels.

Mike

Cindy,

Take a short drive to Whole Foods. WheatMontana is higher protein level than Sir L. AND, it is priced much, much lower, too.

Well, there is another reason that I can fathom. The "real" bagels provide a slicing problem. Too, hard and too likely to cut their palms. They should go back to eating doughnuts and Costco sized muffins.

I've been hounding our local Whole Foods (Madison, NJ) to get the Wheat Montana set-up, but no luck so far. To get WM, I have to hit Wegman's in Bridgewater, which is about 30 miles away. (30 miles may not sound like much, but in NJ traffic, it's a lifetime. )

Barry

Unfortunately, this is true. Bread-like bagels have become part of the American scene. Fifteen years ago, if you were not in a major urban area, you might -- if you were lucky -- find some pre-packaged frozen bagels at the supermarket. Today, the product is ubiquitous and has become something of a sandwich bun with a hole in the middle.

The national chains and franchises have perfected the bready bagel and the average consumer has been fooled into believing that this is what a bagel should feel like. I have nothing against this mass-market product but, just because it has a hole in the middle, does not make it a bagel.

I recall bagels from my childhood which were so chewy that you could hardly bite them. And they would go stale very, very fast because they were made without shortening or preservatives.

When my son was a baby, he used to go with me to the House of Bagels in San Francisco and the woman behind the counter would always give him a tiny "cocktail bagel" to teethe on. :)

(BTW, vis-a-vis that other thread about bakery naming, the House of Bagels' name wasn't that unusual, but it had a slogan on its sign: "When is a seagull not a seagull... When it's a bay gull!" Oy!)

As my son got older, he used to enjoy peering in through the side door and watching the bakers taking trays of uncooked bagels from racks where they had been rising and sliding the bagels into vats of boiling water. They'd rise to the surface of the water, be lifted out with a skimmer, and placed on baking sheets to go into the ovens.

Over the years, I've seen many gadgets for slicing bagels. My grandmother had this plastic thing which could be screwed down to a counter or bread board -- but more likely was just kept in a kitchen drawer. It opened like a vertical clamshell, the bagel was held inside by pressing on the sides of the clamshell, and a sharp kitchen knife was used to cut the bagel in half.

New materials technology has blessed humankind with today's simple and functional "Bagel Biter" which uses structural plastics and a stiff coated-steel scalloped edge blade to guillotine bagels in a single motion.

've only made bagels on a couple of occassions. It's hard to justify the effort when one lives close to a first-class commerical bagel bakery (which I do here in the Boston area.)I recall, however, that adding malt to the boiling water was important for developing an authentic bagel crust. And, I had good luck with bread flour to which some additional gluten had been added.

And, Mike, we're frequent visitors to Colorado and I recall buying commercial packages of bagels from the Rocky Mountain Bagel Company at Costco in Denver a couple of years ago -- and thinking that these ranked among the best commercial bagels. I think they were properly made with malted water. Unfortunately, last time I was in Denver, I could not find these and I suspect that the baking company has not survived.

Finally, just for fun, check out the Boston bagel FAQ at:

The Old Bear

Yup Bear, quite good, at least 8 years ago and so were the Schmiers.

AFAIR they were in the vicinity of Polk & Geary up towards California=20 and used to be a regular treat in our office when I ran a training=20 program for UAW out of the old Jack Tar, then Cathedral Hill Hotel, now=20 something else, on Van Ness & Geary.

I don't think that any city can beat SF, as far as the food is=20 concerned. Too bad I moved into this forsaken hellhole. All you have to do is check the bread isles in the Supermarkets and=20 count the number of junkfood places if you want to know what people eat=20 in any given city.

--=20 Sincerly,

C=3D=A6-)=A7 H. W. Hans Kuntze, CMC, S.g.K. (_o_)

, snipped-for-privacy@cmcchef.com"Don't cry because it's over, Smile because it Happened"_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/=20