Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish | Cathy Barrow
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Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with, Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York city, sitting at her dining room table talking to cookbook authors.
Cathy Barrow: I'm Cathy Barrow. I'm the author of Bagels, Schmears and a Nice Piece of Fish: A Whole Brunch of Recipes to Make at Home.
Suzy Chase: You grew up Jewish gastronomically, culturally, and only marginally observant. Your Boston born mother Jan, was not built for Toledo, Ohio. Tell me about Toledo. How did your family end up there?
Cathy Barrow: Well, my father was born there and his father had a business that although my dad went off to Boston to college, he was always expected to return to run the business, and my mom and dad met in college.
Suzy Chase: Your grandmother Bea, would visit regularly and bring bagels from your mother's favorite Brookline bakery and your mother would find the lone salt bagel in the bag. Was there a particular bagel you would go for?
Cathy Barrow: When I was young, I loved onion bagels. They were my favorite. They have now been surpassed by everything bagels, which I think are everything.
Suzy Chase: Tell me about the everything bagel. Is that a new phenomenon?
Cathy Barrow: It's relatively new. I think probably mid 80s is when we started seeing it. Before then you could get all the different parts of everything, so you could get a poppy, or a sesame, or an onion, or a garlic, or a salt, and then somebody brilliantly combined all of those things.
Suzy Chase: Then you can get the everything bagel mix at Trader Joe's.
Cathy Barrow: You can, and also there's a company called Spicology, and their everything spice blend is really nice because it is salt free. For some people, the salt in everything mix can be a little aggressive.
Suzy Chase: In the book, you talked about how the Brookline bagels were the pinnacle of bagels. They've been the bagels by which you evaluate any others. As you grew up traveled and saw more of the world, did that perspective change?
Cathy Barrow: It may have. I don't know that I know for sure, I just know that when I was young, that was the bagel that I thought of as the perfect bagel. We would have Lender's bagels or some other version of not very good Ohio bagels, freezer bagels. My grandmother and my mother would always say, "Well, it's not really a bagel." And so I thought of those Brookline bagels. They were what I knew as a real bagel. They were crackly, they were chewy, they had that multi scent. That's type of bagel that I look for now.
Suzy Chase: For the longest time, you struggled to make a bagel at home that had the chew density, the tang, the consistency, and the yield you wanted. Talk a little bit about the 2016 Washington Post recipe that led you down the path to produce the better bagel.
Cathy Barrow: Well, I had been trying for years to make bagels, and I had used recipes that I found in old Jewish cookbooks or community cookbooks from temples. I tried everything and they just were not good. They were like dinner rolls. They didn't have any of the qualities that I liked. The Washington Post article pointed out something called high gluten flour, which I had never heard of.
Cathy Barrow: Normal all-purpose flour has a protein level of 10 and a half or a little bit more percent, and protein gives flour strength and the ability to build gluten and have that crackly exterior that you see on a bagel or on a pretzel. When you add protein to that flour or extract the flour that has the higher protein, as in high gluten flour, you're going to always be able to achieve that wonderful exterior crackle.
Cathy Barrow: Now, I buy high gluten flour through King Arthur mail order, but a lot of people aren't going to want to mail order, and I understand that. Also, the idea of keeping multiple flowers can be overwhelming. I learned in my experimentation in testing for this book, there's a product called vital wheat gluten or vital wheat gluten flour. It's available from several companies. Bob's Red Mill is probably the most widely available. By adding two teaspoons of vital wheat gluten to one cup of all purpose flour, you've created that high gluten flour that you need to make the perfect bagel.
Suzy Chase: I feel like the bagel recipe was a super secret thing for the longest time, and you cracked the code.
Cathy Barrow: I hope so. I don't know if it was intentionally secret or if it was just that certain elements were only readily available if you were a commercial baker, things like the high gluten flour.
Suzy Chase: The subtitle of this cookbook is a whole brunch of recipes to make at home. Brunch, very clever. But I wanted to ask you if people have a hard time believing they can make bagels at home.
Cathy Barrow: I think so, and I want to point out that this book will be encouraging and help anyone make a bagel at home. The recipe is foolproof, I've had 100 people make it in their homes all across this country, and they've all been able to achieve a really good bagel. However, I know that it may be a bridge too far for some people, so buy the bagel and make some really interesting schmears. There are about 17 different sweet and savory cream cheese schmears to put on that bagel, whether you make it yourself or whether you buy it from your local bagel bakery.
Suzy Chase: Yes, I was just going to mention that because this is so much more than a baking cookbook. This is really an idea cookbook, I think.
Cathy Barrow: I like that, Suzy. Thank you.
Suzy Chase: You're welcome. You don't have to make the bagels, you could buy the bagels and you teach us how to dress up a grocery store cream cheese, so it's a choose your own adventure cookbook.
Cathy Barrow: My great grand grandmother, Agatha, who was quite a powerhouse was the one who taught me to take a block of grocery store cream cheese and dress it up with some sour cream and lemon juice to make it a little more spreadable, a little tangier and to have a better flavor. That is a something I've been doing all my life.
Suzy Chase: I've been learning so much from the cookbook.
Cathy Barrow: Oh, good.
Suzy Chase: Thankfully, basic bagels involve basic ingredients. I think most home cooks already have flour, yeast, salt, water, but there's one more ingredient that we might not have on hand, and that's barley malt syrup or powder. Now, does this add to the taste or the texture?
Cathy Barrow: It adds to the taste, absolutely. The sweetness that you experience in a really good bagel is from that barley malt flavor. It's in the air in a bagel shop. It's what gives that the distinctive scent. Now, barley malt syrup can be a really infuriating product to use. It's very sticky. If you think that molasses is sticky, it's nothing compared to barley malt syrup, it is beyond.
Cathy Barrow: I've learned that if you keep it in the refrigerator and you use a scale to weigh it directly into the mixing bowl, it will pour slowly enough that can use kitchen shears to snip it, and that's the only way that I can deal with it. Some of my testers found it completely unacceptable. They just were not having it with barley malt syrup, so you have a few choices.
Cathy Barrow: There's a product, a powder that provides the same flavor and it's called non diastatic malt powder. It's available through King Arthur and on Amazon and other online sources, and that's easy to use. Now, if neither of those is available, you can always just use honey or maple syrup to give you some sweetness, but it won't provide the classic malt flavor.
Suzy Chase: Can you talk about some bagel trends that are hot right now? Whether it be a flavor combination or a topping?
Cathy Barrow: I think that there's been a real surge in independent bagel bakers across the country. It had started in the mid 2010, so let's say around 2015, we started to see more and more little bagel bakeries opening up, and that's partly because it's relatively inexpensive to get into the bagel business. You need a mixer, you need a deck oven, and that's sort of it. There are other pieces of equipment that you might want, but you could get started with just those two.
Cathy Barrow: I saw them popping up everywhere in the country, places you just wouldn't even expect, Omaha, or Salt Lake City, and I was really thrilled by it. It really motivated me to get this book together. Now, the pandemic closed a lot of those as with many restaurants, they couldn't withstand it, but I'm seeing more and more open.
Cathy Barrow: I'm thrilled to see this trend of young, independent bagel bakers across the country. I'm seeing sourdough bagels, wood fired bagels. There's always the New York versus Montreal style. In Philadelphia, Michael Solomonov, is doing Jerusalem style bagels, so there's a lot happening in the bagel space.
Suzy Chase: Now to my bagels speed round. Number one, to toast or not to toast?
Cathy Barrow: I'm not coming down on this one. My husband is a toaster and I'm not. Mm-hmm (negative). You be you.
Suzy Chase: Not touching that. How do the toppings adhere to the bagel?
Cathy Barrow: Well, you boil bagels before you bake them, and so they're nice and wet when they come out of the boiling water bath. In some bagel shops, what they have is a big tub of seeds and they just throw the wet bagel directly in there and then pull them out and put it on a sheet to bake on.
Cathy Barrow: At home, what I do is I sprinkle, but I try to get to that bagel while it's still really quite wet from the boiling water bath. They won't all stick, they'll land on your plate, but that's what the schmear is for. It catches them, you can pick it up with the schmear.
Suzy Chase: What are the two methods to shape a bagel?
Cathy Barrow: I call them the poke them or the roll them method. When you first have your bagel dough ready to shape, you divide it into, in my case, my recipe yields six bagels, which by the way, I think is the perfect yield, and so you have six balls that you've weighed out of equal size. You can either take that ball and push two thumbs through the center, stretch it, and then use your index fingers around one another to make a wider hole and form a circle. At that point, I put my hand through the center of the bagel and lightly roll it along the work surface to tighten up that edge.
Cathy Barrow: With the roll them method, I make a rope or a snake of dough, and then form it around my four fingers at the base and pinch it together, and then use that same rolling it against the surface method to even out the scene. Now, one of the women who's been reading this book in preparation for a talk that we're doing in Seattle in a couple of weeks said that her students looked at the bagels sitting, getting ready to proof, and said, "Well, what about out those stretch marks?" Because they're not perfectly smooth at that point. And I love this idea that they're called stretch marks. Anyway, those will all work themselves out as the bagels proof overnight.
Suzy Chase: What's the difference between a New York bagel and a Montreal bagel?
Cathy Barrow: The essential difference is barley malt syrup versus honey. Montreal bagels are sweetened with honey. They also traditionally will have seeds both top and bottom. They also are made with a different flower, not with a high gluten flour, more all purpose. They tend to be a little lumpier, a little homelier, and not have quite as tight an exterior shell as a New York bagel.
Suzy Chase: I was going to say the accent.
Cathy Barrow: Yeah. There's that too.
Suzy Chase: What's the right size?
Cathy Barrow: Now this was a challenge for me as I worked through the initial recipe development. I wanted six bagels because I wanted the yield to be reasonable for a household like mine. And if you want 12, you can just double the recipe, but six bagels seems like the right amount. I needed to get them to a size that I did not feel was what I call airport size. You know when you go to an airport and you get a bagel and it's about as big as an individual pizza? Yeah. I didn't want that. I wanted it to fit in the palm of my hand.
Cathy Barrow: As I messed around with the recipe, I wanted to also have even amounts of things like yeast. I wanted a teaspoon or not seven-eighths of a teaspoon, you know what I mean? I had to get all those measurements reasonable and then see what size the bagel would be. I got it to about 110 grams each, which I think is perfect. I also love to make them half size, make mini bagels for a brunch, so there are 55 grams. And that way your guests can taste a lot of different types.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Dream Dinner Party, where I ask you who you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why? For this segment, it can only be one person.
Cathy Barrow: Oh, honestly, Suzy, I'd invite my mom. My mom has been gone about 15 years. I've written four books since she passed away. She was an English teacher and an author herself, and there's nothing that would make me happier.
Suzy Chase: What would you make for her?
Cathy Barrow: Oh, we'd have a bagel brunch, of course.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Cathy Barrow: My website is cathybarrow.com. That's Cathy with a C, B-A-R-R-O-W. And I have a newsletter that comes out every two weeks, you can subscribe to my website. I'm active on Instagram, a little less active on Facebook and a little less active on Twitter, but really available at all those places. Cathy Barrow, everywhere.
Suzy Chase: Not Barrow, people.
Cathy Barrow: That's right.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish, head on over to cookerybythebook.com. Thanks so much, Cathy, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Cathy Barrow: It's been a delight. Thank you, Suzy.
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