No matter how much you cook, there will always be bad days. Whether it’s a fallen souffle, a forgotten cup of sugar in a pan of brownies, or an overcooked piece of salmon, there are days when things just don’t work out as planned. Hopefully these days are infrequent, but they are inevitable.
Kitchen disasters are easier to handle when whatever it is that you’re making requires a minimal effort. When it’s something like, oh, I don’t know, bagels, they’re a bit harder to deal with. You put the effort into making the dough, waiting for it to rise, shaping bagels, boiling them, sprinkling on toppings, and finally baking them. At the end of all that work it would be nice to have a pan of nice, chewy bagels. Do you want to know what is not so nice? Getting 3/4 of the way through the process and realizing that the final result will be anything but a decent bagel. Let me illustrate.
Nice little bagel-shaped pieces of dough, awaiting their turn in a pot of boiling water. This seemed promising.
They looked a little on the small side before, but once they hit the boiling water they at least doubled in bulk. Things were looking uphill, but they abruptly went downhill once the bagels left the water and shrunk to their previous size. I still had hope, though. I told myself that the bagels probably needed the heat of the oven to really rise. The growth in the boiling water was just a preview of what the final result would be.
Or not.
The recipe I used said to boil the bagels for 10 minutes, and I think that was where things really went wrong. Most recipes have you boil the rounds for just a couple of minutes, but I went against my better judgment and boiled them for a full ten minutes. As a lady in my building’s elevator once yelled after accidentally hitting the alarm button, “MISTAKE! MISTAKE!” The long boiling period left them waterlogged and unable to rise, or really even bake through.
I baked them for almost twice as long, hoping they would eventually dry out and lighten up, and I ended up with fairly burnt bottoms and insides that still looked raw.
Some of the bagels were so raw and doughy that I ended up chucking them, but there were a few like this one that I didn’t let go to waste. I figured they weren’t going to be the best bagels I’ve ever had, but they weren’t going to poison me either. And here I am to tell you about it, so I guess my reasoning worked.
Now that I’ve shared one of my kitchen disasters, feel free to share yours. Also, does anyone have a decent bagel recipe? I found one that looks promising that I plan to make soon, but I’m open to suggestions.
I wouldn’t call this a “disaster” per se, but more like a labor of love that didn’t love me in return.
I was trying a new recipe for Senegalese Peanut Stew. And I’d invited a friend to join us for dinner. It wasn’t a particularly difficult recipe, but it was time consuming: lots & lots of chopping. So the night before, I decided to chop & cook everything, then I’d keep it in the fridge overnight & reheat it the next day.
The one ingredient I left out at night was spinach – and I figured adding it the next day once it was heated would be perfect. The recipe called for 8 cups of stems-removed, chopped fresh spinach. Well, after my night of chopping, I was NOT going to remove the stems of 8 cups worth & then chop it, so I thawed some frozen.
I added two cups – TWO CUPS – of frozen spinach (thinking that would about add up to EIGHT of fresh). And my stew was done. It was spinach, basically, with random other vegetables mixed in. All my time (and the deliciousness of what it was the night before) was gone. And I needed to feed myself & two other people dinner…
Not a “disaster” – but it pained me to see all that time in a big sticky mound of spinach in the dutch oven.