It wasn’t until the very recent past that I heard about Josey Baker. Josey, who happens to have a bakery (he swears that’s his real name!), is a baker by almost accident. He says that one day a friend of his stopped by his apartment in San Francisco, where he used to be a teacher, and left him some sourdough starter as a thanks for having him over for a few days. His friend also left behind a set of simple instructions that Josey studied for several days before trying to bake.
Finally, spring is in the air! This weekend we had some friends over and had our first pizza party of the year at the Houston bar. Pizza parties are fun for a few reasons. They provide a casual atmosphere for people to hang and graze, the kids run around, have fun, and sometimes even pitch in! It’s also fun to cook outdoors and leave the mess out there.
One of the things I want to do on this site is to share with you the (many) mistakes that I make as a home baker. Not all breads are beautiful, not all loaves are perfect. For one reason or another, I often mess up and want to use this space to share with you pitfalls you will likely face when baking in your own kitchen.
Fresh bagels with a little schmear on it are hard to beat. Hard to beat unless you add blueberries to the mix, that is. That’s exactly what these are, delicious New York Style Blueberry Bagels.
So what makes a bagel NY Style? I looked this up and found that there are predominantly two types of bagels in North America. The Montreal Style and the New York style. The difference between the two types of bagels are subtle but notable. While the Montreal bagel is made with malt, sugar, no salt, and is boiled in honey-sweetened water before being baked in a wood-fired oven, the New York Style bagel contains salt in addition to the malt and sugar, is boiled in plain water and is baked in a standard oven.
When I started baking about 10 years ago, I really didn’t know what I was doing nor what I was trying to do. I was so excited about making bread at home that whatever happened to come out of the oven was a tasty surprise. One day, my neighbor Dave introduced me to what is now one of my favorite bread books of all time, Bernard Clayton’s “Complete Book of Breads“. It was also exciting that we were living in Bloomington, Indiana, where Clayton also lived. We always talked about hunting him down to get his autograph and maybe a get a little first hand wisdom but we never worked up the courage to do it.