Blackstrap Molasses Bagels!

For this week's bread experiment I made bagels. But I played with the recipie a bit. Instead of just plain sugar to feed the yeast, I put in really, really black molasses instead, and I boiled them with some baking soda, a trick I learned when making home-made soft pretzels.

They are fookin' amazing. The molasses touch is wonderful, they're a deep brown color, and the baking soda really helped make the outer crust soft and tender.

( The recipie. )

Notes: Kneading is not "about ten minutes," although that's what all the recipies say. Kneading is about making the dough elastic and homogenous, and that takes, well, as long as it takes. Although I started a timer, I stopped around nine minutes-- any more kneading and I knew the dough would have just toughened up and dried out more. It really is a matter of practice, and after baking a dozen different things I think I've got some sense of what properly kneaded dough looks like. I've also gotten used to working with sticky doughs and have learned not to be paranoid about having it stuck to my hands. It all works out in the end.

I've also learned that the "until doubled" is a much better gauge than "for an hour and a half." Bread should be trusted: after a set period of time, say an hour with these modern "instant" yeasts, start checking every fifteen minutes. If it looks big enough, it probably is. Go head and go on to the next step.

On the other tentacle, never trust "instant" yeast. Always activate it in a bowl with hot water beforehand, adding the sweetener (but no other dry ingredients) if the recipe calls for sweetener.

Much of the instructions in modern cookbooks and baking manuals is aimed at people who have never made bread even once in their lives. Once you figure it out, though, many of the steps they advise can be modified or ignored (and trusting the yeast, as many of them do, is just plain wrong).