Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Dear Panarians,
A PANARY bagel.
I have been tinkering about lately with bagels since they are going to be demonstrated here at PANARY when the Bread Angels come for their event in early February. For today’s Baker’s Topic I am looking at features of the bagel crust that lead to such memorable aroma and flavour, nicely set up by the Maillard Reaction in the piping hot oven. The same goes for the pretzel too.
CALENDAR & DATES for this New Year
Visit https://www.panary.co.uk/course-calendar-and-booking/ to view all courses and their programmes, and make bookings
FEBRUARY
- Sat 9th — 1 Day Basic
- Sat 16th — 1 Day Sourdough
MARCH
- Sat 16th — 1 Day Pizza & Italian
- Sat 23rd — 2 Day French – with Sourdough
- Fri 29th — 3 Day Going Professional
APRIL
- Sat 6th — 1 Day Sweet Doughs (Easter)
- Sat 13th — 1 Day Basic British
- Mon 29th — 4 Day “PANARY In Provence”
MAY
- Sat 11th — Open Afternoon – All Welcome
- Sun 12th — 1 Day Wood-fired Oven
PANARY IN PROVENCE
This course in a French vineyard begins on Monday April 29th, and there is only one place remaining before it is declared full.
Click here, to view this course, and book the last place.
PANARY ‘EXPERIENCES’
Panary Experiences are being designed now and will be launched in Spring.
- Shorter
- Much smaller fee – under £100
- Experience a deep and rewarding treatment of the course topic in barely 4 hours
- Experience a deep and rewarding treatment of the course topic in barely 4 hours
- Fees will be layered with a higher fee to include a collection of useful baking equipment
BAKER’S TOPIC, bagels, the water bath
For both bagels and pretzels, dunking them in the water bath is very important for their appearance and flavour.
Many experts will say that it is the process of dunking in boiling water that is the making of a good bagel. Industrial baking pursues convenience, and corner cutting is defended as “cost cutting”, so nowadays the boiling is replaced by steam injection in modern rack ovens. To an afficianado of the real bagel, this oven steaming gives an inferior result, and bagels made without the boiling are rated as inferior to a point of being not worthy of the name.
The bath of simmering hot water is made up as a caustic alkaline solution, which in the past was made by the addition to the water of lye. Lye’s chemical name is sodium hydroxide and it can climb to 14 on the pH scale. Although one can purchase food-grade lye it is essentially the same caustic solution that is used for making soap and cleaning drains. Its importance concerns the ultimate dark crust, the way it forms and tastes. The alkaline nature of the water bath affects the relationship between proteins and sugars on the surface of the dough. When the alkaline lye breaks down the proteins into smaller amino acid particles these fuse more easily with the sugars in the dough surface, creating flavour compounds, and setting up the crust of the bagel for a more spectacular Maillard Reaction in the oven.
The Maillard process is responsible for browning, and the widely different flavours of many foodstuffs, mainly in roasting, baking, grilling, and frying, of which bread is just one. For the best and quickest reaction it needs high temperatures and a dry surface on the cooking food, which will soon be hotter than boiling point. During the process, literally hundreds of compounds will form, all responsible for flavour, aroma, and colour.
With bread, the Maillard Reaction becomes an important phase of the baking stage, affecting not just crust colour but, more importantly, aromas and flavours. Its occurrence is based on that reaction between reducing sugars (simple dietary sugars, monosaccharides like galacose, glucose, and fructose) and amino acids undergoing extreme heat. It is different from caramelisation, which only destroys sugars, and occurs at even higher temperatures. As explained for the bagel, the Maillard Reaction is enhanced when the food comes from an alkaline environment.
Most amateur bakers and home bakers would agree that it is a big step to handle dangerous lye that requires rubber gloves and protective goggles. You can avoid lye by making instead your alkaline solution for your water bath using soda bi-carbonate, also known as baking soda, some types of which can reach about 9 pH. For those purchasing the common form from suburban shops, use it in the water at 6% (meaning 60 gm to a litre).
Good baking, Panarians, and I hope you try bagels.
Paul
The scalding of flour involves taking aside a portion of the flour in a bread recipe and stirring very hot water into it. The flour starch is gelatinised in the process, and adding the gelatinised starch to the dough imparts different and special qualities to the fermenting dough and the finished bread. To be gelatinised means that it is made soluble, and in this form as a carbohydrate it becomes readily accessible to the yeast. The scalded material in the dough will give added plasticity to both the crumb and the crust, which is an important feature when making bread without much gluten, such as rye bread. This plasticity also makes the kneading of the dough much easier.
Recently, when for my book research I was delving into the origins of the Assize of Bread (13th century), I gained an insight into the origin of our currency and the establishment of the English pound, later to be called “pound sterling”. At the time of the Assize the silver penny was often the sole coinage used, and it had been the most popular form of currency for the preceding six centuries. It was introduced during the 8th century by the great King Offa of Mercia. The pound mentioned above was a pound weight of silver, to be divided into 240 silver pennies (and 12 pennies made a shilling, with 20 shillings to the pound).The penny weight of silver had been calculated as 32 grains of wheat, dry, and taken from the middle of the ear. This fascinating link between wheat (and other grains too) and money standards goes right back to Roman times. It stands as yet another example of the deep role that wheat has played in our civilisation.
