I want to say it’s kind of a work ethic. Above someone mentioned “Dunkin’ Donuts” bagels. It’s kind of the same thing - if you are making donuts you are up at 4AM. Dunkin’ Donuts had a commercial - it must be the 80s as the guy looked like my Chemistry teacher - and the point of the commercial was he’d wake up and say “Time to make the donuts”.
Some donuts and all bagels & bialys need to be, I beleve the term is “proofed” where they’re tossed into a big boiling vat of water and baking soda. You’re to take them out when they float - yet it’s like making meringue. You are a pro when you know.
As a former New Yorker I do not reckon I’m going too far to say that the best bagels come from Jewish deli’s and bakeries. Is it “work ethic” I dunno. I just asked my Russian wife what the best bagel she had was she said while we were waiting for the Staten Island Ferry (cheap way to the the Statue of Liberty for free). That was 13 years ago. Best Bagel I had was at a place in Greenwich Village called “Lox around the clock” (get it?).
Yep, that was the ad campaign. All about work ethic - gotta do what you gotta do even if not so cheerfully.
My 10th grade Chemistry teacher did not appreciate the comparisons to his looks. Yet he was a pric who picked on and berated what he perceived as the dumbest girls. So yeah, part of our 40 minutes was not about Heisenberg or why we use calcium carbonate - NaHCO3 to proof bagels.
When I needed baking soda in the UK early on - they had no idea what I was asking for. “So you can cook with it and also place it in your fridge to trap odors”. Arm & Hammer? The what now? Finally a woman said, “Oh, calcium carbonate!” and yep that’'s it. Dunno what I was making (baking powder + tartrate = baking soda yet tartrate is expensive). I think pretzels - same thing - when the dough floats onto the pan and into the oven. As easy as making meringue.
Shortly after his death, Dunkin’ Donuts stopped making their donuts in-store, and they are now trucked in at most locations, with a few remaining as central manufacturing locations (CML).
So it’s like Krispy-Kreme (sp?) and to me, stuff made in the bakery/donut/bagel shop really does matter. “We truck in the freshest donuts to your particular iocaion depending on where you are. And there is a 4AM now?”
Dunkin’ Donuts Wal-marted my nearby donut shop, Mr. Donuts. Their donuts were mixed, proofed and baked right there. Damn you DD!
The main baking soda I know is bicarbonate of soda, which releases carbon dioxide as a leavening agent. I am not sure what you would cook using calcium carbonate (or maybe she meant sodium carbonate, which is sold in the laundry stuff department), so maybe don’t listen to random people
Yes, that was the solution the saleswoman in the Tesco came up with. And yeah, I was looking at my chemical formula grabbed quick off google and wondering what the sodium was for.
I also just remembered that Baking Soda/Bicarbonate is not only (supposedly?) good for fridge odors and “Kettling” (thanks Fins!) but also used in making crack from cocaine. “Oh, then you should ask our pharmacist…” and now I’d not be surprised if he doled it out gram by gram suspiciously.
Kettling is a bagel-making technique that involves boiling bagels in water to create a signature chewy, shiny crust
Kettling (also known as containment or corralling) is a police tactic for controlling large crowds during demonstrations or protests.
Must be a British use of the word in the latter case, though the tactic is certainly well-known and practised by the NYPD.
As we’re on about bagels, that step to me seems the most critical in a good bagel or pretzel. You need to have your kettle all set at the right temps and know just when to extract each piece. And you’ll know right then if you’ve done it right. Just like meringue.
We have a thing called self raising flour which already contains baking powder, so there’s not much call for it.
Until I lived abroad, I thought the whole world used self raising flour. Turns out it’s just the Brits and a few ex colonies like australia and South Africa. I confused a lot of shopkeepers in Prague.
Fairly common in the US also. Nothing close to the amount of all purpose and high gluten flour consumed. It is a big country though and many people have been using it for things like traditional biscuit and pancake recipes.
I was going to check myself on that, yet baking powder is so common and I was asked several times if that’s what I wanted. Still, cream of tartar is fairly expensive compared to soda/powder.
It should also be noted that one type of baking powder is baking soda + cream of tartar. Most modern baking powders have a different combination of leavening ingredients. You want a dry base and dry acid. And modern baking powders are often double activating, which means they react at room temperature when you mix them, and again after heat is applied. One popular brand in the US, Clabber Girl, is sodium bicarbonate, aluminum sulfate, and monocalcium phosphate. Another one, Argo, is Sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium bicarbonate, and monocalcium phosphate. Baking soda + cream of tartar you see in more old-fashioned recipes, in my experience (like for snickerdoodles, a type of cookie or what you’d call a biscuit in the UK. It has some residual cream of tartar in the recipe so there’s a slight tangy bite to the cookies, when measured correctly.)
Depending on exactly what you mean by “they stopped making the donuts in the individual restaurants.” There are apparently three ways that DD gets donuts currently. They can be made on site, at a central kitchen that franchisees have teamed up to build, or the franchisees can order frozen donuts to be reheated and finished. It’s possible that the central kitchen that serves multiple franchisees only dates back to 2005 or so and I’m sure the frozen donuts are fairly recent - but “one store makes all the donuts for this franchisee’s multiple locations” goes back much further, at least to the early '90s. There are four DD within a mile of my house , all owned by the same person - three are not large enough to bake on site and never were. But the fact that the donuts were baked maybe a mile or two away doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the quality - if they have to travel two hours from the central kitchen to the store, that might be a different story.
Thanks for that. Certainly I think the ones that were frozen and then reheated are not going be the same as fresh made, whether on site or at a nearby central kitchen.
(BTW, I was kind of kidding about the coincidence that they changed their production process right after the actor who played the actor died.)
Baking soda is common in the UK and has been for a long time (it’s present in the oldest cookbooks I have) - it’s typically known as ‘Bicarbonate of Soda’ here.
Baking Soda = Sodium Hydrogen Carbonate = Bicarbonate of Soda = NaHCO3
Washing Soda = Soda Crystals = Soda Ash = Na2CO3
Lye = Sodium Hydroxide = NaOH
Lye (which I believe is the thing used for preparing bagels) is an uncommon household chemical in the UK. The other items in the list above are common.
