November 4, 2017 - 9:39am
Bagels & pretzels ...
... I made up the dough for NY Water Bagels, formed the twelve shapes and refrigerated them this afternoon for tomorrow's breakfast. However there's a good chance my wife and I will not demolish the lot! So I am musing - why not set half aside for dinkum bagels and the other half for boiling in a baking soda/water solution for ersatz pretzels? I did a quick search through TFL archives, and nothing suggested this was not feasible.
Any thoughts that the latter will be a waste of otherwise good bagel dough?
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Haven't done pretzels properly yet. Are you able to freeze leftover bagels, or prefer them fresh? I use mainly some flavor variation of Reinhart's recipe and always make a double batch. My shaped bagels rise on sheet trays stacked on racks on an empty fridge shelf overnight. It's rare to have that space, and I'm not going to all that work for a dozen or less. While the water and oven heat, they warm up enough to pass the float test. The extras are frozen, thaw pretty fast, and taste fine to us.
I'm curious to know how bagel dough works as pretzels, so let us know.
... and I overdid the salt!
I think the bagel dough was over-proofed as, though they were delicious, I would have preferred a slightly plumper bun.
Anyway, we did not go hungry this morning!
Pretzels should be fine if you can get the water alkaline enough. I've never seen it done properly with baking soda so I use lye. Maybe bagels are a better choice.
https://food52.com/blog/17934-to-supercharge-the-power-of-your-baking-soda-bake-it