u/RollingTrain

Hi! My latest batch of bagels. Always trying to hit that NY feel since that's where I grew up. This was an adaptation of the thia.codes recipe which was shockingly similar to my own discoveries over the years. The addition of sugar and oil, plus the short boil is something I found works very well in a home oven environment.

The difference with hers is higher protein flour than I usually use, and lower hydration (53% vs 57%) plus brown sugar instead of white. She also uses more salt than I do.

I did add nondiastatic malt to the mix per usual. Finally I put some salt in my liquid barley malt boiling water, I find it helps with overall flavor. I'm extremely pleased with how these turned out!

Also a tip if anyone wants that authentic NY bagel experience from long ago: If you are topping your bagels, take a tiny bit of the bottled dehydrated garlic and randomly and very sparsely add it to all of them. All the bagel shops of yore couldn't help but have a very small amount of the pungent garlic flavor randomly on every bagel because it's just what would happen when they were near the garlic bagels. Going for authenticity here - only if you and yours don't mind garlic, of course!

Some years back I was at a wildlife preserve in the northeast US, and got this single snap of a woodpecker type bird in the wild.

Only to find when I got home and identified it that it was in fact... a yellow bellied sapsucker. It's a male, as the male has the red throat in addition to the cap.

What a gift! I lived my whole life to that point thinking it was a bird made up by either Art Carney or Jackie Gleason. It's not!