Skip to main content

When kitchen meets experiment- make your classic sourdough bagel with 'lye'

Yes, it is correct- I ordered some food-graded lye on Amazon. If you are not familiar with lye, aka sodium hydroxide here, it is actually a very corrosive chemical. You know, my nerdy scientists, we use it in lab all the time. But when it comes to making pretzels and bagels, do you also recognize that the classic pretzel wash has lye in it. A quick dip in the magical/alkaline water creates a rich brown sheen with thin crust on the dough.


Sounds intimidating, it is acceptable for someone who deals with other hundreds of millions of 'sort-of-scary' experiment every day lol. (I've been thinking about what my years of labwork& research have brought me for my life: for real, protocol reading and testing things out.) Plus I'm just such a bagel fanatic- that explains a lot.


I guess I fell in love with bagels even before with New York City, where the best bagels are made. Toasted bagel, cream cheese and some slices of smoked salmon makes those busiest New Yorkers' perfect morning. I guess that's also why this on-the-go/ kind-of- healthy (definitely if compared to doughnuts) food is just so popular here. Right across the street of my apartment is one of my favorite bagel spots, so I haven't been bothering to make my own bagels until recently.


Thus, making my own bagel is purely out of curiosity I should say? After all, I've been making so many regular breads. The bonus is- I can add as much poppy seeds, garlic and sesame as I want XDDDD

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Continue the whole crepe theme: cocoa& banana infused crepe cake

I've been making crepe cakes in a row for three weeks! That sounds ridiculous even to myself, but I just like to keep practicing one recipe until I finally feel happy about it. As a result, I never get the have the 'beliked' cakes often. Now, after my crepe cake battle, I did learn some tricks, especially about how to have really thin crepes. Let's have some troubleshooting, shall we? For those who are not familiar with crepe cakes, or care only about how they taste but never bother to know how they're made, crepe cakes are assembled by layers of crepes, filled with cream in between. To make a crepe cake, you make the crepes individually, let them cool, and layer them to compose the cake with the cream as 'glue'. The whole process is nothing fancy, just get your 'bricks and cement' ready and be a good builder! What is tricky are the quality of your materials, in other words, to get your crepes as thin as possible. There are professional crepe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What should I do now? Figure out a great scientific problem or MAKE SOME ECLAIRS

This week has been CRAZY!! (Whoops did I say that sometime somewhere already?) But I mean for real! I'm just constantly going through my forever confusion about many: life, science, science, life, what to have for lunch today lol, WHAT DOES DNA REPAIR HAVE TO DO WITH T CELL FUNCTION??? OK, the last one is just the 'brilliant' qualify exam (FYI, qualify exam is the test I need to take in order to become a phD candidate which I'm not yet) topic that I somehow came up with! And all my last week was all about this wild idea... I don't want to talk more about that- I've bored my lab mates enough and I'd better make a STOP. On the other hand, science is just all about someone coming up with crazy idea and someone else prove it right (or wrong). It's fascinating if you think of it in this way, but it is always so ambiguous, too. I get lost so easily T^T......I always feel it is so hard to feel fulfilled from experiment, which is a different story for bakin...
Post a Comment
Read more