Some recipes - like Martin's Bagels or Jeffrey's Bagels with Pâte Fermentée - also add a preferment, which increases the overall fermentation time. For this reason, most good bagels get a long, cold proof to develop flavor. How you ferment a bagel also determines its taste. The longer the shaped bagels sit before baking, the more tender and open-crumbed they’ll tend to be, since the tension built into them during shaping will have had time to relax. Other recipes have you shape the dough into bagels and then proof them for a lengthy stretch, usually in the fridge. Some recipes ferment the dough in bulk (as one large batch of dough before dividing) and then shape, boil, and bake the bagels in quick succession. The next element that goes into a bagel’s texture is how it's fermented. You can watch Martin demonstrate the technique in his bagel video.) A floured linen is helpful to prevent sticking but a floured or cornmeal-coated sheet will work. (The whole process is actually easier to do than it is to describe. To do it, you hold the ball of dough in your hand and push your fingers through the center from both sides to form a ring, which you then stretch out to bagel dimensions by gently rolling both index fingers around the inside of the hole. The belly button poke technique is both easier to pull off and far gentler on the dough. A gentle stretch creates the right shape. (To achieve even more tension, you can corkscrew the rope around itself a few times before forming the loop.) For a visual of the rope-and-loop, watch Jeffrey Hamelman's episode of the Isolation Baking Show on bagels. Because it involves a lot of dough manipulation, this is the method of choice when you want to build a lot of tension into the dough. You then wrap the rope all the way around your open hand and roll your palm over the overlapping ends to seal them together. In the first method, you form the pre-shaped ball of dough into a rope. There are two basic ways to shape a bagel: the rope-and-loop method, and - as my friend and fellow bagel-baker Jess Wagoner likes to call it - the “belly button poke." A good amount of the chew in a bagel should come from the baker building tension into the dough during shaping. The third element that determines the texture and crumb structure of a bagel is how the bagel is shaped. But bread flours with a more modest amount of protein (around 12%, like our 12.7% unbleached bread flour) can make an excellent bagel too, albeit one with a more tender, open crumb as can the inclusion of whole grain or high-extraction flours, which provide more flavor and texture as well. New York-style bagels with an intense chew are usually made with high-gluten flour that has a protein percentage at or above 14%. Flourįlour choice plays a major role in determining a bagel’s texture and crumb structure. Higher-hydration bagels are also easier to mix: Low-hydration bagel doughs can be a challenge to knead fully without some serious effort, even in a stand mixer. Recipes on the higher end of that hydration scale produce a breadier, more open-crumbed bagel, which can be nice they also have the added benefit of being somewhat longer-lasting. It’s also why even the best bagels should be eaten within a few hours of baking - with so little moisture in the dough, the crumb will stale quickly. This helps give them their signature tight crumb structure and their chew. Hydrationīagels are usually made from a stiff, dry dough, with hydrations in the range of 55 to 65% (compared to soft sandwich or crusty artisan breads, which are usually 65% hydration and higher). Bagel dough is stiffer than many bread doughs.
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