American rhapsody, episod 1: The bagel
I don't know why but I had been thinking a lot about american specialties these days...This morning I made my tour on the favourite cooking sites I have and when I arrived at Martha's the theme of the week was...of course...4th of july. I thought all morning about making some nice burgers for dinner, of course somebody else at home would have been enchanted about the idea but bad luck we just decided to start a little diet and to cut for a little while our consumption of red meat! Luckily I didn't suggest him that we could make burgers for dinner because probably the diet would be an old story at the time I write those lines!
Football saved me!
Anyways the idea of making typical american dish stayed on all day and I chose to start with one of my favourite: the bagel. I used to eat loads of them during my year in Miami, warm, full of cream cheese, slices of cucumbers and smoked turkey...hum delicious.
First I was a little bit afraid about the result...after all it was the first time I made them. I also had quite hard time finding a recipe easy to understand and all of them were quite different!
I finally mixed a little bit of a recipe I found typing "bagel recipe" on google and some of my experience in bread making...
Here are the ingredients I used:
550 g of flour
3,5 dl of warm water
11 g of dry yeast
1 tbspoon of sugar
2 tbspoons of salt
1 egg
First we have to mix the yeast with 1 dl of water and the sugar and keep it on side for 5 minutes. In the meanwhile we can pour the flour and the salt in a bigger bowl, then pour the rest of the water and then the yeast mixture. Now the hard work starts, we have to work that mixture enough to have a soft dough.
Once the aim is reached we keep the dough on side for about an hour.
Enough time to go for a little walk under the rain, listening Billie Holiday's autumn in New York and think that 1) the weather definitely makes the day look like a november day and 2) that bagel is really in the air today, I'm listening a song about NY the capital of bagel!
Alright enough walking and thinking...back to our kitchen...and our dough...
We have to form little balls with the yeast and make a hole in the center of them with our thumb. I made 10 bagels with this quantity of ingredients. Then we have to make our little balls rest a little bit (about 15-20 minutes).
We will turn the oven on, 225 degrees. We can also fill a big pot with water and one tbspoon of sugar and make it boil. After the 15-20 rest it is time for bath! Our bagels will relax two minutes each in the sweet-boiling water.
After that we have to spread on them some special white egg lotion, to give them a nice tan during their trip to the oven. 20 minutes exactly on the oven and here are they, beautiful, golden, tender and crusty!
I wanted to make a special summer filling for my bagel, so I prepared some kind of mixture with
1 tomato
2 sun dried tomatoes
some green olives
1 clove garlic
I passed the ingredients in the mixer, spread it on the bagel, add some slices of goat cheese, a green salad...
Hum...what a nice moment!
To be continued ...
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