Donnie’s Blog

Last weekend I did another bagel experiment. This time I made blueberry bagels. I acquired a bag of dried blueberries from Trader Joe’s and chopped up a cup of them as fine as I could with a chef’s knife. Somewhat surprisingly, this created a mash about the same consistency as the contents of Fig Newtons, which made it difficult to work with.

When it came time to make the dough, I threw in chunks of the chopped up blueberry mash, and just worked the dough until everything was uniform. Success! I was very pleased with the results.

Other changes from last time:

• I let the bagels rise a second time after forming them. Good choice.
• Instead of rolling cylinders and trying to join the ends together, I made discs and carefully poked a hole in the center to work them into the bagel shape. Also a good choice.
• I didn’t egg-wash the bagels this time. Doesn’t seem so appropriate for blueberry bagels; they don’t need a golden brown color. They’re blue!

I’m pretty pleased with the results. They taste really good.

Last week was so crazy that I just needed to take a break and make some tasty baked treats, so I tried my hand at making bagels over the weekend. It was quite an interesting process, since bagels are different from “normal” bread in two ways. First, bagel dough is much denser than regular bread dough. This makes kneading it much more physically demanding, but if you keep at it then you can produce a very nice malleable dough.

Second, bagels are actually poached in boiling water before they are baked! This is what gives that characteristic “bagel” feel to the bread. You only poach them for about a minute before you get them ready for the oven, so it’s not too crazy.

Anyway, here is a picture of the results (click for a close-up):

My biggest complaint about how they turned out is that they are way too dense. This is because the recipe I used only has you let the dough rise once, before forming it into individual bagels, and I wasn’t smart enough to realize that this would be a problem. Really, you need to let the bagels rise once more, to get that nice fluffy soft result that most people enjoy at the bagel shop.

So, I will probably try this again next weekend, because it was just so fun! My ultimate goal - blueberry bagels. One of my favorite bagels of all time is the blueberry bagel from Goldstein’s Bagel Bakery. It’s a consistent winner, but I just don’t get over there too often anymore. So, if I can only crack the bagel secret then I’ll be able to enjoy them anytime I want.

Today I ate at Lucky Boy for the first time. This is really strange since I went to both high school and college only a few miles away from the place, and I was often up very late at night. Oh well; not knowing how tasty the food is has probably preserved decades of my lifespan.

I got the double cheeseburger, and I think it definitely rates in the top 3 hamburgers that I have ever eaten. Yes, I have a rating system, and yes, I really do keep track of such silly things.

Considering only tastiness, the rating is:

1. Monster Burger (Red Robin)
2. 1/2 lb. Double Cheeseburger (Lucky Boy)
3. 1/2 lb. Cheeseburger (Tops)

However, I think that Lucky Boy’s burger probably shortens your life more, so taking health into account:

1. Monster Burger (Red Robin)
2. 1/2 lb. Cheeseburger (Tops)
3. 1/2 lb. Double Cheeseburger (Lucky Boy)

(Yes, after 30 you start taking health into account…)

I won’t bore you with the rest of the list. Not in this post, anyway…

I love it when a plan comes together.

I haven’t been to a farmer’s market in ages. But, since I have two big meals to prepare this weekend, I thought I had better hop on over to the South Pasadena Farmer’s Market so that I could pick up a few things. Honestly, I just had no idea where I was going to find this stuff, but fortunately I found everything and more.

(more…)

I made another pizza on the ol’ Weber grill on the weekend. I think I am finally getting this process down pat. (It was really touchy when we didn’t have any cornmeal in the house; pizzas simply will not slide off the peel if you don’t have a good layer of cornmeal laid down.) Anyway, in the past I would use too much charcoal, and the bottom of the pizza would finish cooking before the toppings had all cooked. This time I finally used slightly too little, and I didn’t get that nice crisp crust that I was looking for. So, next time it’s a 3/4 full chimney-starter for perfect pizza.

I realized today that I hate the whole concept of wraps. Wraps are for people who can’t decide if they want a sandwich or a burrito. Make up your mind. (And choose the sandwich.)

Today I made my first sourdough starter ever. It’s not much to look at - just a blob of flour and water that will hopefully start growing yeast and then fermenting. I call it Lil’ Blobby - it just looks like it needs a name. Plus, if I name it, it’s more likely that I’ll actually be responsible about feeding it and checking up on it, according to the schedule in the cookbook.

Of course, like any good pet, Lil’ Blobby will make a good meal in a few days. Lil’ Blobby’s just a giver.

Tonight some tuna showed up unexpectedly. My mom has a way of getting ideas that something or other would be cool to pick up at the store, and then it’s up to me to turn it into dinner. It’s our own home-version of Iron Chef, I guess. Today’s surprise ingredient was a package of three tuna steaks from Costco. ALLEZ CUISINE!

So, I marinated them in soy sauce, rice vinegar, ginger, garlic, sugar, and a little sesame oil. Then I seared them in a cast-iron grill pan. YUM. I took the marinade and reduced it on the stove to use as a sauce. (Added some more sugar to cut through the salt.) The flavor was great.

The best way to enjoy tuna steak is to cook it rare. Only problem is, this fish was packaged four days ago. Not so thrilling a thought now, huh? But what could I do? I made mine rare anyway. I mean, come on, it’s tuna.

So now I count down the two- to eight-hour incubation period for food-poisoning. We’ll see if I dodged a bullet or not…

I wish the waitresses at Coco’s wouldn’t keep refilling my coffee cup all the time. I mean, I know they think they’re doing me a favor, but what they don’t realize is that I just painstakingly achieved the perfect balance of coffee, cream, and sugar, and what I really want to do is to enjoy that perfection all the way to the bottom of the cup. Not get a surprise 1/3-cup warm-up, struggle vainly to regain what I was just enjoying, and then resignedly (and grouchily) drink what ends up being a pale shadow of the perfection I had just fifteen seconds before the coffee caravan steamrolled over my morning.

Yeah, so I get worked up about these kind of things. It wouldn’t be a problem if I always drank my coffee black, but I like to mix it up. Er, so to speak.

OK back to work.

Last night I wanted a treat after finishing my lectures for the week, so I went ahead and made myself a nice pizza. I wanted to try something interesting and new, so this time I just spread out some olive oil on the dough, and then laid down some thinly sliced tomatos, garlic, onions, and some capers! (Yep, no tomato-sauce.) Then I sprinkled just a little bit of mozarella cheese on it; just enough to bind everything together. I also (lightly) salted and (heavily) peppered the ingredients to give them a little extra flavor.

Now, a nifty pizza like that needs to be cooked right, so I put my pizza-stone in the oven and cooked the pizza on that. This made the crust just excellent.

That thing was good. Unfortunately, it was so good that I ate the entire thing in one sitting.