This is the recipe I’ve been using, though it uses yeast, not starter. Can make six small or eight really small ones. Small batch stuff is generally faster to make, less processing, and less food, which is either good or bad. Some things like this you might be able to do in a toaster oven, to save on energy, either holding half the bagels in the fridge unbaked for a day or so, or crowd them all in today. Or when I have my act together, I bake a couple different recipes in the oven at the same time.
Done in about an hour or so, give or take.
The boil is in water with a bit of brown sugar.
These are my two cheese bagels (don’t tell my daughter, she asked for six cheese bagels). I added some shedded colby/cheddar about halfway through the baking.
When the water was boiling and the oven hot, I added the sugar, salt and hopped up baking soda.
You added sugar, salt & soda to the water, yes? I spent some seconds trying to imagine how you’d add them to the already-formed doughballs. Then I read the comments & I think I understand now.
I am a damned Yankee, and back in a previous life when travel was allowed, I visited many southern states and ate at many diners. Cornbread in the south tastes different (and so much more delicious!) than cornbread in the north.
What’s the secret?
I am also a Yankee by birth/upbringing, so I can only hazard a guess, but I suspect bacon grease is somewhat responsible (as @belovedvillain suggested ). That and/or buttermilk.
I’m a heathen and use coconut milk (the canned variety) in mine.
Only about a quarter of American Jews keep kosher, though the study didn’t specifically ask about regular bread during Passover. The core belief for the holiday, for me, is actually remembering when we were strangers in Egypt, and that it is our duty to welcome the many types of strangers in our lands. The matzoh, to me, is more of a prop than the true core belief.
He could have just posted a bagel recipe without mentioning Passover and it wouldn’t have changed the value. But the message I think he’s going for, I think, is, “with everything going on in the world I can’t be trifled with meaningless ritual.” And what’s sad about that is that the entire message of Passover is about why and how we should find meaning in ritual, and how doing weird stuff like taking a week off from bread or having a day we try to make amends with people we might have hurt or celebrating trees gets us through the hard times.
Passover isn’t just about some shitty things from a long time ago, but lots and lots of shitty times when in the midst of it all, we took a breath and huddled together and kept telling these stories and performing these rituals as a touchstone, to remind us who we are as a culture, how we depend on each other, and what really matters in not just our personal lives and in the immediate moment but as a community. The Passover Haggadah literally gives instructions on how to respond to people who are struggling to find meaning in ritual.
Nu, if matzoh doesn’t work for you this year, cool. But while withdrawing from community and intentionally breaking ritual might feel right the appropriate choice this year, be mindful that sometimes when you have this feeling of “with everything going on I just can’t,” the support derived from knowing you’re part of thousands of years of people feeling like that, sticking together, and making it through.
Oh, and if anyone reads this far, here’s a sort of weird, interesting sight to share with you (though you’ll have to look for it at the right time of day and week)- while the public webcams on Bourbon Street and the Vegas Strip are eerily silent, and the ones in Tokyo are filled with people looking uncomfortable about being too close together, at the Wailing Wall, old Orthodox Jews are continuing to pray, but are also exercising social distancing.
Yeah I use lye intended for soap making. I use 1 tablespoon in what is probably about a half gallon. I don’t measure the water I just know how full it gets on the pot I use.
One more tip: make sure the pot is clean. If your pot has baked on crud the lye will clean it off. First time I tried I had to dump the water and start over with the now clean pot.
Keeping kosher is nearly impossible and incredibly expensive unless you live somewhere like Monsey. But even assimilated Jews give up chometz for Passover.
You are right. It is times like this when yidden gain strength from being yidden and connecting to the past. But one of the good things to come out of this is tearing away the extra stringencies and neurotic-bordering-on-psychotic chumras so that we concentrate on what is essential. The thousand person Seder at 770 is not essential. Covering everything with aluminum foil and obsessing about exactly what size of feather you need to gather chometz is stupid. Matzah is essential. Gebrokts and the exact size of olives 3000 years ago to compare to the amount you ate and deciding that only the crunchy tops of matzah which came into fashion 200 years ago are “real” isn’t. Telling the story is fundamental. The exact tune your particular sect uses to sing Chad Gadya isn’t.
I first read the headline as ironic, but the fact you don’t mention that Bagels are the no.1 not allowed food for specifically Passover just seems between rude and careless. It should be “what better way to NOT celebrate Passover while still being culturally Jewish in quarantine.”
That’s a sweeping generalization that I can tell you is not true, unless I just happen to be friends with a couple dozen exceptions to the rule. Sometimes I have, sometimes I haven’t. Depends where I am in life. My ex never did.
ETA: I’m certainly not knocking the observance, or the importance of the concepts of the holiday.
Jason wrote, “l was forcibly indoctrinated into that cult. Now I am free to bake as I wish.” that sounds fine, but don’t call it celebrating Passover. He seems to have a complicated relationship with being Jewish, but the headline reads that he is doing something sarcastic or subversive rather than celebratory. Passover is about teaching Jewish tradition to children, or as Jason derides in another post as old shit from long ago. It’s weirdly insensitive but it makes sense coming from a defensive tortured person. Glad you used pretzels on the Seder plate tho, I wish you had included that information in your Bagel article!! Or some explanation to the reader into why you were explicitly disobeying one of the few rules we teach at Passover.
For me, the entire message of Passover is that we should remember when we were the outcasts and refugees, and that we have a sacred duty to help the outcasts, refugees, strangers, and mutants, happy or not, in our midsts. I do like that I’m part of a religion that has a document that tells us, 36 times, to be treat the strangers well. I am entirely troubled that there are a minority of Jews that view themselves as more Jewish than myself who support a regime that has demonization of the refugee and the stranger as a central tenet. These state of our union is currently shit. I clearly see parallels between the shit of yore and today. Both in the US and Israel. Here, Trump has family and advisors who describe themselves as Jews who are allegedly some of his most trusted advisors. I think you absolutely can follow the rituals and the meanings at the same times and that many, many do. It’s great that you treasure the history and rituals, and find the ritual helps to guide you that way. But not all who follow the ritual what I view as the central message, and they are ruling this country. I treasure the history, but my eyes tend to glaze over at the ritual. Possibly my ADD. For me, working towards stopping the harm and helping the stranger is paramount, over the ritual.
That said, chag sameach.
Baking = Eating = Life