YW SD Sprouted Multi-grain Bagels – 50 Percent Whole Grain

Old school NY bagels  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_xTIrT_aiI&feature=youtu.be

One of our favorite things to do with bread is to make them the ‘old school’ way.  You can bread using sourdough made from scratch for that bake like a pumpernickel or you can use an old school method not used much anymore too.  Another fun thing about bread is to take old school and make it current and edgy.

That is what these bagels are all about.  They are made the way they once were, are smaller than the monster cake bagels so popular today.  They are healthy with over 50% whole grains most - of them sprouted.

They have the 4 ancient whole grains too:  Kamut, spelt, emmer and einkorn along with oat, wheat, rye and barley.  Some new, including yeast water, to go with the old makes for an old school bagel that you couldn’t get way back when or even now if you don’t make then yourself .

The 2 levains were built on a heating pad separately over (3) 4 hour stages and then retarded for 24 hours.  The YW levain was built with the whole emmer and einkorn non-sprouted grains and is perfect for opening a dense crumb and cutting the sour a bit.  The SD levain was made from 10 g of 24 week retarded rye starter and was fed the 20% hard bits from the sprouted 6 other whole grains.

Bagels require a different method than most other non enriched breads.  It is too stiff to knead properly in my KA and slap and folds are out of the question.  Normally, a white bagel recipe might come in at 53% hydration but since these had over 50% whole grains we upped the hydration to near 60% which still felt just aas stiff an white bagel recipe.

Since most of the water is in the dual levains there isn’t enough to properly hydrate the dough for an autolyse.  So we added the levains, after they had warmed up for 2 hours on the heating pad, to the dough flour, barley malt syrup and dough water.  We mixed it into a ball and then sprinkled the pink Himalayan sea salt on top and let the dough rest for 30 minutes.

This gets the fermentation process going pretty fast with the salt not in the nix. Once the salt gets mixed in we did 8 minutes of old school kneading by hand.  Thos is the only bread we still use this old school kneading method to develop the gluten,  After a 30 minute rest  we did 2 more minutes of kneading and then let the dough rest for 30 more minutes.

We then portioned out the dough into 6 equal weights and formed a tapered rope like a baguette for each and let them rest for 10 minutes under a damp towel before forming the bagel over the knuckles the old school way.  Each bagel was placed on a corn meal dusted piece of parchment paper on a baking tray.

We then bagged the bagels in a trash can liner and left them on the heating pad to ferment for an hour before placing the bag in the fridge for an 18 hour retard.   Once the bagels came out of the fridge we put the bag on the heating pad for 2 hours to finish proofing before placing them in near boiling water.

The water had a tablespoon of baking soda, 1T of barley malt syrup and 1/2 T of molasses in it to mimic lye.  We soaked the bagels for 30 seconds each side in the water before placing them round side down on a kitchen  towel and then into the seed mix to coat.

Don't forget the SD biscuits and the grilled salmon dinner.

After coating the bagels with mix of black and white sesame, black and white  poppy with caraway, basil and oregano seeds and Kosher salt, they went back onto the parchment on a baking tray and then into the 425 F preheated oven with Mega Steam for 8 minutes of steam.  Once the steam came out the temperature was turned down to 400 F convection this time  - for 10 more minutes of baking before being removed to the cooling rack.

Or the apple crisp

The bagels puffed themselves up in the heat and browned well enough.  The bagels came u out NY style with a thin, crispy crust while the crumb was fairly open but all chewy in the wonderful way only a bagel can provide.

Best of all these were the best tasting bagels I’ve ever made and that is saying something. The perfect mach of old and new that is hearty, healthy and nutritious.  Just great, even un-toasted with a schmear and Nova Lox for lunch – yummy!  

And then there is Lucy's salad