Week 8 Bake: The bread you boil first

The week 8 bench session — a 55% dough on high-gluten flour, shaped and retarded the night before, then boiled in malt water and baked hard

12 April 2027

A bagel dough is 55% hydration on flour with 14% protein, and it will fight the mixer for twelve minutes before it agrees to be a dough at all. Week 3 went looking for the wettest dough you could still handle. This is the other end of the same dial.

Before the session#

The dough is made the night before, not here. Mix it at home, shape it, and give it 12 to 24 hours at 4 °C. Nothing in the session works if you turn up with a bowl of fresh dough.

Buy high-gluten flour at 13–14% protein. Bakers’ flour at 11.5–13% will make something bagel-shaped, but the chew will be soft and you will know. Buy barley malt syrup too — the non-diastatic kind, which is cooked so its enzymes are dead. It is about two-thirds maltose, and it does three jobs at once: colour, a dark malty flavour that nothing else supplies, and a little sugar the yeast can eat in a dough that has no other sweetener.

Per 500 g of flour: 275 g water, 10 g salt, 3 g instant yeast, 25 g malt syrup. That is 813 g of dough and eight bagels. Mix it stiff. In a stand mixer that is ten to twelve minutes on low, and the machine will walk across the bench if you let it; by hand it is twenty minutes with two rests, because dry gluten hydrates slowly and there is not enough water in there to lubricate the strands while they link up. You are still looking for a windowpane; it just takes twice as long to get one. Finish at 24–25 °C. Bulk for forty-five minutes only — the real fermentation happens in the fridge.

Divide into eight pieces of about 100 g. Shape them by either route: roll a rope 26 cm long, wrap it round the back of your hand so the ends overlap by 4 cm, and roll that seam against the bench until you cannot see it; or round the piece tight, drive a thumb through the centre, and stretch the ring on two fingers. Whichever you use, open the hole to about 5 cm. That looks absurd. It will not look absurd tomorrow, because the ring swells in the boil and again in the oven, and a hole that looked right on the bench closes into a navel.

Rings go on a semolina-dusted tray and into the fridge uncovered. The cold buys flavour, as it did in week 4, and it does a second job here: it firms the ring and dries the surface to a skin, so the shape survives ninety seconds in moving water. Cover them and you get the flavour without the skin.

Read the week 8 lecture before you come in, so the boil makes sense while you are standing over the pot.

In the session#

Three hours, and the pot is the only queue. Float-test first: drop one ring into a bowl of cold water. If it surfaces within ten seconds it has enough gas in it to be worth boiling. If it sinks and stays down, it is under-proofed: leave the tray at room temperature for twenty to thirty minutes and test another. Boiling an under-proofed ring gives you a dense puck with a pale, tight crumb, and the oven cannot undo that.

Get a wide pot of water to a steady roll — 4 L, with 60 g of malt syrup stirred through it. Four rings at a time, 45 seconds a side. They will sink for a moment, then rise.

The water gelatinises the starch at the surface into a continuous skin, and that skin is the whole bread. It seals the ring, so oven spring is cut short and the crumb sets dense and chewy instead of opening out. It comes out of the pot glossy and tacky, which is the only reason seeds stay on. And its pH decides the crust colour: malt water is near neutral and browns to a warm tan; a tablespoon of bicarbonate per litre lifts it to about pH 8.5 and gives a darker, faintly soapy pretzel note; food-grade lye goes past pH 13 for a deep mahogany crust, and we do not use it on this bench.

Do not leave them in. Past about two minutes a side the skin over-gelatinises and dehydrates, and the bagel bakes out leathery with a wrinkled, elephant-hide surface — as does one that went into the pot over-proofed. Lift them straight onto a rack for thirty seconds, then seed them wet, both sides, pressing into a plate of sesame or poppy.

Bake at 225 °C on a tray for eighteen to twenty-two minutes. No steam. Week 2 used steam to hold the crust soft so the loaf could keep expanding; the boiled skin has already settled how much expansion you get, and steam now would only keep the surface from drying to a gloss. Turn the tray at ten minutes. The centre should read 96 °C and the base should be a shade darker than the top.

Afterwards#

Cool them twenty minutes before you cut. The chew is still setting, and a bagel cut hot tastes gummy in a way it will not taste an hour later.

Log the same four numbers as always, plus two more this week: hours in the fridge, and seconds in the pot. Those are the two variables that move a bagel most, and you will want the record.

Bake-off 2 is due at the end of this week, on Friday 16 April, and it covers weeks 5 to 8. Read it now rather than on Thursday. Bagels are on the list of breads you can submit, but not these ones: the formula above has 3 g of instant yeast in it, and the bake-off wants a loaf raised by your starter and nothing else. Rebuild it on a stiff levain if that is the bread you want to take in.