Category: Food

Making homemade bagels may seem daunting, but it really isn’t. It had been ages since I’d made bagels. Then it occurred to me that bagels would be excellent candidates for finishing off in a gas grill.

You can read various theories on what defines a bagel, including the use of barley malt in the boiling water. But, as far as I’m concerned, what defines a bagel is that they’re boiled before they’re baked. This boiling of the dough until the dough sets is what gives the bagel’s crust its “pull.”

Today’s bagels were a mixture of sourdough and yeast. The flour was about a third stone-ground whole wheat and two-thirds unbleached white flour. There are many recipes on the web (as well as YouTube videos) on making bagels, so I’d suggest starting with some Googling if you want to try it.

I really don’t think bagels are prone to failure. What happens when the dough hits boiling water is really more predictable than what happens when dough goes into an oven. Plus, bagel dough is not a delicate affair. A strong, less wet dough (which is easier to deal with) is fine for bagels. If the dough were too soft, you’d risk having it fall apart in the boiling water.

Managing them on the grill is a challenge, though. No spot on my grill seems to be exactly the same, so uniformity is a problem. I found myself frequently moving the bagels around to try to equalize their baking. Given that I had to shuffle things so much, getting perfect grill marks was out of the question.

The bagels were delicious. The crust was better than any bagel crust I ever had in San Francisco (which is not the best bagel city in the world). No one in his or her right mind would claim the ability to compete with New York bagels.

The rising is done, and they’re ready to boil

A bagel in boiling water

Brunch today was low carb — roasted onions and cabbage and a slice of vegan baloney — to help make up for bagels at supper.

I was itchin’ to try the gas grill as a bread oven, so I made a loaf this afternoon. It was not perfect, but baking in the grill seems entirely manageable. And after some Googling, I see that plenty of other people also use grills for baking bread.

To add a margin of safety, this loaf was only about a third stone-ground whole wheat and two-thirds unbleached white flour. It was a mixture of sourdough starter and ordinary yeast, which has become a habit with me mostly because I like the taste. There was not much oven spring, but I have never been good at oven spring. Such oven spring as I got was not at the top of the loaf, where I had slashed an X, but around the edges.

My grill has a warming shelf several inches above the grill surface. I set my cast iron skillet on the shelf. To try to get some steam into the oven, I put a pan of water on the grill and let it come to a boil before I put the bread in the oven. The bread was still slightly too done on the bottom because of the high flame down there, but that was not a big deal. It didn’t burn.

The best part of this bread was its shatter-y crust — not a bit tough. There was a very slight whiff of flame in the taste, but not much. Here are some observations and some notes for the next attempts:

— Put the pan of water directly under the bread pan to keep the bottom crust from getting overdone. Use less water.

— Get a smoker basket and give the bread a teensy touch of hickory smoke.

— Throw an onion on the grill for the last ten minutes or so to give the crust a little roasted onion taste.

Overall, it was a fine little loaf of bread with a superb crust. I think there are two keys to getting a good crust. One, don’t use any oil at all on the dough either while it’s rising, or in the pan. Use only flour to prevent sticking. And two, get as much steam into the oven as you can. Steam is always the biggest challenge.

It’s extremely unusual to get a grab-n-growl bargain at Whole Foods. But I think the fresh corn yesterday, three for a dollar, qualifies. I suspect that anything that early and plentiful came from Louisiana or some such other place that has been getting all of our East Coast rain.

And the chickens sure do like to clean the cobs.

I post about bread fairly often. It’s not that I eat a vast amount of bread. I probably eat less bread than most people. But I almost never buy bread, so, unless I bake it myself, there’s no bread in the house.

Hot weather is a challenge. I hate heating up the oven when it’s 90 degrees or more outside. The oven pours heat into the house that the air conditioning system then has to get rid of. So, it’s flatbreads to the rescue. Flatbreads can be baked, quickly, in a skillet. So the overall energy use, and therefore heat production, is lower. If you have an outdoor grill with a griddle, then flatbreads could be made outdoors in the shade. Flatbreads also would make good campsite bread.

Lots of cultures have flatbreads. Rather than calling them by a foreign name, why not just assimilate flatbreads into American culture and call them flatbreads. What defines a flatbread is that it’s not leavened. If it’s made from wheat (as opposed to corn), it will blow up like a balloon in the pan, forming two layers, each half of the starting thickness. I call this process “popping.” To be really good, flatbreads must pop. It will deflate, of course, after you remove it from the heat. But that’s OK, because the bread has split into two layers with a pocket inside.

To get your flatbreads to pop, you need a reasonably soft dough. The skillet must be hot. And you must roll the dough to the right thickness. If it’s too thick or too thin, it won’t pop.

All whole wheat flour makes a tough flatbread that, though good, won’t pop very well. Half whole wheat and half unbleached flour works nicely. The skillet must be hot almost to the smoking stage. There’s no oil in the skillet, or in the dough, so high heat is less risky. As for how thick to roll the dough, experience is the best teacher. The dough is just flour, water, and a little salt.

Flatbreads love to be lightly buttered while they’re hot. They’re great with summer curries and summer stews like ratatouille. If you’re new to flatbreads, practice your flatbread skills now, and you’ll be ready by ratatouille season. Flatbreads are also great with summer favorites like tuna salad or hummus.

Cooks who teach other cooks how to bake with sourdough often recommend mixing in some ordinary yeast. That serves as a kind of insurance against total bread failure for inexperienced bakers, and it greatly hastens the process. For a long time, I refused to use any yeast. Sourdough was sourdough, and yeast was yeast, and I would not mix the two.

But making sourdough bread is a long process. If you start the night before, you can have bread for supper the next day. But what if you take a notion in the afternoon to have hot bread for supper? Only yeast will get you there. But so will a mixture of sourdough and yeast. To mix the two offended my sense of integrity until I realized that the combination of yeast and sourdough tastes great. It also gives you something to do with sourdough starter that you might otherwise throw out when feeding your starter.

Another factor is that, when I go to the trouble of making sourdough bread, I make a large loaf. Because of the lactic acid, sourdough bread won’t mold the way yeast bread does. A sourdough loaf is good for toast for a week. For sandwiches, it’s good for at least two or three days. But quicker loaves can be smaller loaves. Smaller loaves equal smaller waists, and hot bread for supper.

So, to mix the two, pour two-thirds or more of your sourdough starter into a mixing bowl. Feed the starter and put it away. Then add enough flour and water for a small loaf, plus a teaspoon or so of yeast. In a couple of hours it will be ready to bake.

I’m always experimenting with ways to bake with steam. In the photo below, note that I’ve fitted a Pyrex bowl to an iron skillet. As long as the loaf is not too big, it works nicely to keep the loaf steamed while it’s springing in the oven. Breads that contain very much whole wheat won’t spring very much (at least, not for me), but the steam still improves the quality of the crust and helps give it that texture that shatters when you break it. The loaf in today’s photos contained another experiment — a small potato is mashed into the dough. It made a heavier crumb and didn’t improve the bread in any way. No more potato, at least for everyday bread.

While I’m thinking about wine, here’s another good value, from Trader Joe’s. For at least a couple of months now, Trader Joe’s has carried both a chardonnay and a cabernet from Liberté vineyards. That winemaker is in Paso Robles, which is in San Luis Obispo County in southern California. Both the chardonnay and the cabernet are $9.99.

Truth is, I never cared much for so-called “fine wines.” As the price of a bottle of wine rises, the increased quality either diminishes rapidly in line with the law of diminishing returns, or the value is entirely fictitious and is related to heightened demand, or snob appeal. I’m one of those people who see wine as food. I’d no more pay $40 for a bottle of wine than I’d pay $20 for a cauliflower. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with good country wine. I also don’t mess around much with weird varietals. When I’m shopping for wine, I go always look for honest, basic, fruity chardonnays and cabernets.

The butter is a little brown not because I overheated it but because I had cooked a Trader Joe’s fake sausage before cooking the egg.

Six or seven years ago, I bought some nonstick Calphalon pans from Williams Sonoma. They were on sale, but they were still pricey. They were said to be dishwasher safe. For several years, they worked great. But now they’ve mostly lost their nonstick qualities, and using them is a lot like cooking with cast iron.

I would have guiltily written this off to putting them in the dishwasher and not taking proper care of them, but from doing some reading it appears that all nonstick pans eventually stop working. Good pots and pans should last a lifetime or longer — except, apparently, for nonstick pans. So if a pan is going to last for only five or six or seven years, then why pay Calphalon prices?

While I was on the lookout for replacements, so-called “green” pans with a white ceramic coating caught my eye. They are moderately priced, just above the level of cheap. Some Googling and reading finds that, though they greatly reduce the toxic substances in nonstick coatings, they still may not be entirely free of toxins. These pans generally get pretty good reviews. The small pan I bought is clearly marked as not safe for dishwashers. And clearly it should never be used on high heat. At least while new, it does a fine job of cooking eggs.

The egg in the photo, by the way, was picked up from the chicken house about 10 minutes before I cooked it. I did not feed the chickens yesterday, forcing them to forage in their woods lot and in the grass of the orchard. Chickens eating greens makes for really golden egg yolks. When the girls are first let out in the morning, they immediately go for chickweed and clover. Though it comes back to me indirectly, I do get some nutrition out of that delicious-looking organic grass in the orchard.