17% Whole Grain

We just love the authentic, taste texture and chew of Stan Ginsberg’s Favorite Bagels that are authentic and just plain delicious any way you want to eat them.  We keep messing with the grains and starters to get what we want in our favorite bagels.

 All the whole grains are in the starter, a new thing we are trying out lately.  The grains were home milled rye, WW and Kamut and make up 17% of the total flours.  We also included a little less than 10% of roasted potato left over from Beer Can Chicken. 

 As usual with out take on bagels, there is some barley malt, red and white malts were included to improve the color and taste of the bagels along with adding the enzymes that break down carbohydrates and starch into sugars that the yeast and bacteria can use to do their thing gas and sour wise.

 We have been using a combo YW and SD starter to build the levains for recent bagels and we did so again this time.  We get a nice moist open crumb with a slight SD tang using a combo starter.

From left to right front - Chia seeds, Sesame, white sesame and Multi - all the prvious plus, black sesame, kosher salt, basil and  nigella seeds.

 We used exactly the same method as last time and baked the bagels off in the mini oven using Sylvia’s steam developed for it.  Our change from Stan’s method is to proof the bagels after forming for 1 hour before refrigerating and we retard them for 24 hours before boiling them.

 These are now our favorite go to bagel and have now met our taste, texture, chew and color criteria.  They are just delicious.  Now there is not reason to go to NY for bagels anymore and it sure is cheaper too.

 Method

We built the YW and SD levain together over (2) 3 hour and (1) 2 hour build and then refrigerated them for 48 hours. Home ground whole wheat berries were used for the starter and accounted for all the whole grains in the final dough.

The flours, salt, mashed potatoes and malts were autolysed for 3 hours and hand mixed into the levain. The stiff dough was kneaded for 10 minutes by hand and then allowed to rest, ferment and develop for a whopping 15 minutes covered with plastic wrap on the counter.

The dough was them divided into (10) 122g pieces, folded into balls and then into 12” tapered, from middle to end, ropes. The ropes were rested for 10 minutes and then formed into bagels by the ‘over the knuckles’ method where the ends were rolled on the counter to seal them together.

The bagels were placed onto a parchment covered and corn meal sprinkled cookie sheet, covered in plastic wrap and refrigerated for 24 hours.

Latest $2 Goodwill purchase yesterday at half price.  It's a 901 - just perfect for an oval shape bread or nice baked chicken. 

After removing the bagels from the fridge, they were immediately simmered for 30 seconds a side in 1 gallon of water with 1 T of barley malt syrup and 1 tsp of baking soda. The wet bagel bottoms were placed on a kitchen towel for 5 seconds after coming out of the water, dunked in the topping of choice and then placed on parchment paper sprinkled with semolina which was on the top cover of the mini ovens broiler.

The mini oven was preheated to 45o F with the rack on the bottom. A 1 cup Pyrex measuring cup with a rolled up dish rag, half full of water, was micro waved until the water boiled. Sylvia’s steaming method was then placed in the middle of the parchment paper between (4) bagels at the corners.

The bagels were steamed for 8 minutes with the heat being turned down to 450 F. At the 8 minute mark the steam was removed, the bagels turned upside down and the rack rotated 180 degrees. The Mini Oven was also turned down to 425 F, convection this time,  at the 8 minute mark too.  After an additional 4 minutes, the bagels were turned 18o degrees on the parchment – still upside down..

At 16 minutes total baking time the bagels were deemed done. They were nicely browned top and bottom and sounded like a drum when tapped on the bottom. They were moved to wire cooling racks until cooled.

Formula