The Year in Bagels
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The best bagels in Los Angeles are the ones made in my house. This is a ludicrous opinion. Los Angeles is a bagel town now. But the best bagels in Los Angeles are the ones in my freezer right now, roughly sliced and crammed into plastic baggies, their sesame seeds shedding, waiting to be revived by my toaster oven's "frozen hash brown" button.
It's way more work than a no-knead loaf of bread — you knead dough, for one, then proof it, shape it, boil it, top it and bake it. But a bagel can be breakfast in a way toast cannot. A dozen bagels are breakfast for two for a week, and every morning you get to appreciate your past self's ingenuity. The memory of the kneading and shaping and boiling and topping, combined with the bagel's satisfying, hearty chew, transforms it into something transcendent. The effort-to-pleasure ratio is off the charts.
My obsession began in April, when I took a Zoom class from my colleague and personal bread influencer, Dayna Evans. I'd seen Dayna posting photos of bagels instead of her beautiful bread and honestly didn't get it — why make a bagel? Over the course of the class, Dayna kneaded a batch of dough and shaped her bagels in two different rounds, and I was sure I would make my own exactly once.
My first batch I made with instant yeast using the Modernist Bread recipe from a copy my editor left at my house. When they were done, I was overwhelmed with a sense of accomplishment — how lucky was I to have all these fat round bagels to eat? But things really took off when I started using the sourdough bagel recipe from Modern Sourdough by Michelle Eshkeri, which Dayna had recommended. Never had I tasted a bagel so flavorful and wheat-y and wholesome. I started making them every week.
The best bagels in Los Angeles come in two kinds: sesame, or a freestyle everything that occasionally includes red pepper flakes and is at its best when I have nigella seeds. Last summer I undertook an elaborate quest to make the seeds stick, which involved ordering a specific kind of tapioca starch online to make a slurry. It turned my bagels into. . . sticky slurry bagels. (Modernist Bread contains some good recipes and others that, at least for me, fail comically). Now we let the sesame seeds fall where they may, namely, everywhere.
I started making sourdough bread three years ago, but never as consistently as I've spent this year making bagels. Sourdough bread is best when its high hydration, and high hydration breads are fickle as hell. Lower hydration bagels are much more forgiving. So in many ways, they're better practice than any 30-step loaf. I understand dough tension, and gluten development, and even flavor much better than before.
If you'd like to take a crack at your own sourdough bagels, here's a recipe from Andrew Janjigian's Wordloaf, a lovely newsletter by a recipe developer I trust very much.
The year in everything else
In 2021, the biggest development in my writing life was signing with a literary agent, the lovely and brilliant Laurie Fox, who is definitely about to receive the next draft of my novel in her inbox any day now.
-I'm most proud of a piece I wrote about dismantling my obsession with "eating healthy" by eating tons of ice cream for my actual health
-I also loved reporting on the explosion of Instagram bakeries here in Los Angeles
-Eater's travel editor Lesley Suter and I spent three days cooking in the desert and we think you should, too
Five newsletters that brought me a ton of joy this year
-Chaoyang Trap, a newsletter covering Chinese internet culture that's entertaining and smart and refreshing
-Garbage Day, the only internet culture newsletter I look forward to reading
-Vittles, my favorite food newsletter. Maybe my favorite food publication?
-Hung Up, where Hunter Harris seems to be having so much fun writing about her smallest and weirdest obsessions that it makes you wonder why you shouldn't double down on your hang ups, too
-She's a Beast, Casey Johnston is my personal fitness influencer, and her work is such a natural fit for newslettering
A book recommendation
If you want to spend holiday break tearing through a couple novels and enjoy fantasy like, at all, do yourself a favor and pick up Naomi Novik's Scholomance series. Think magic school but full of monsters out to eat delicious adolescent wizards. The main character is the very reluctant future queen of darkness. If the third one doesn't come out soon I might die.
Just a nice video
Do fantasize about renovating a traditional house in a Japanese village? I didn't until I watched this, but now I do.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end! I have no idea if this newsletter will be more frequent in 2022, but I hope so. Please send me your own favorite newsletters and books you devoured and recipes you were obsessed with.
—Meghan