Cathy Barrow's brunch book is all about the bagels

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Our cookbook of the week is Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish: A Whole Brunch of Recipes to Make at Home by Cathy Barrow. To try a recipe from the book, check out: The pumpernickel bagel, balaboosta cream cheese and home-cured lox (cured salmon).

Sure, you can buy a bagel at any grocery store — slice it in half, slather it with cream cheese and top it with translucent slices of lox. But then you’d be missing out on the fun of making them: mixing, proofing, shaping, boiling and baking. Not to mention the pleasure of bringing the aroma of a bagel bakery into your home kitchen.

“It’s very promising to smell that in the morning,” says Cathy Barrow, author of Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish (Chronicle Books, 2022). “It just feels like your day is getting off to a great start.”

As a testament to their enduring appeal, even after writing a book devoted to them — producing hundreds upon hundreds — Barrow still makes bagels once or twice a week.

“It may seem ambitious, but once you start, it’s hard to stop,” she adds. “I wrote two books on pie (When Pies Fly, Pie Squared) and it took me about three years before I could eat another piece of pie. But I’ve not gotten sick of bagels yet.”

In her fourth book, the Frederick, Md.-based writer, recipe developer and teacher explores the ringed bread to its fullest.

She features recipes for the classics (e.g., New York, Montreal and pumpernickel), “Bagels (Her) Grandmothers Wouldn’t Recognize” (e.g., gluten-free, granola and Hatch chili Jack) and bagel brunch “outliers,” the bialy and pletzel.

The rest of the book applies whether you buy the bagels or bake them yourself. A section on schmears includes savoury and sweet options, and balaboosta (Yiddish for ‘perfect homemaker’) cream cheese, which has a completely different mouthfeel and spreadability than store-bought.

In the final section, “A Nice Piece of Fish,” Barrow shares specialties from the appetizing store — fishes, salads, pickles and ferments, as well as “family favourites” such as summer beet borscht — followed by bagel sandwiches and brunch menu ideas.

Because they need a slow, cold rise, she explains, planning is key when making bagels. With home bakers in mind, she offers plenty of helpful tips, including how to time your bagel-making.

“Sometimes just figuring out the math of those hours can be really daunting. And so many recipes say proof overnight. But then you think, ‘Am I obligated to only make this so that it has to go in at nighttime?’ The quality of light or the moon doesn’t really make a difference with my yeast,” she says, laughing.

As someone who lives in a small household with limited fridge and freezer space, bagel yield was one of the factors that drove Barrow most when developing recipes. To work within space constraints, she didn’t want a dozen bagels, or even eight or nine: Six was the magic number.

A batch of Barrow’s bagels fits on a quarter sheet pan, which means you don’t have to struggle to fit them in the fridge for their eight- to 14-hour rise.

With just five ingredients — high-gluten flour, malt sweetener, yeast, salt and water — each one matters, says Barrow. But, as she concluded while writing the book, “It’s all about the high-gluten flour!”

High-gluten flour can be hard to find in amounts suitable for personal use (i.e., less than the 50-lb/23-kg bags available at restaurant supply stores). When she started writing the book in spring 2020, Barrow went to great lengths to secure it.

“I actually had to drive out to a nearby town to (meet) a pastry person who had 50-pound bags of Sir Lancelot Hi-Gluten Flour, because I couldn’t get it anywhere else. It was like a drug deal on the side of the road,” she says, laughing.

“’I’ll take that 50-pound bag and here’s $25.’ It was very funny, but that’s how I first started testing all these recipes.”

High-gluten flour is 14.2 per cent protein — versus bread flour’s 11–13 per cent and all-purpose flour’s 10.3. It “brings the chew, the glossy exterior shell, and the dynamic rise that responds to a water bath and high-temperature baking,” Barrow writes.

Given its elusivity, she found a way to work around high-gluten flour using a readily available ingredient: vital wheat gluten whisked into all-purpose flour. (You can find vital wheat gluten at bulk stores, such as Bulk Barn, grocery stores and online.)

“Learning the vital wheat gluten hack changed everything for me,” says Barrow. “It meant that I could tell people in other towns how to do this without saying, ‘First, mail order this flour.’”

When it came to replicating the city-specific classics, New York City wasn’t an issue, since she was so familiar with them. Montreal bagels, on the other hand, required some research.

With international travel out of the question, Barrow ordered six dozen bagels from Montreal institution St-Viateur. She studied them carefully: freezing, defrosting, toasting and examining the way the seeds were applied. “I did everything to understand the Montreal bagel,” she says.

Good bagels may be available in most North American cities today — far beyond epicentres Montreal and New York — but that wasn’t the case until recently, Barrow adds.

Growing up Jewish — “gastronomically, culturally and only marginally observant” — in Toledo, Ohio, there were no bagel bakeries. At the time, bagels were only available in a few cities where there were large Jewish populations.

Barrow’s family relied on deliveries from her maternal grandmother, Bea, who would arrive with a hatbox full of bagels whenever she visited from Boston.

“Somebody has said that bagel mules are in every family. If you don’t live in a city where there are bagels, there is some relative who will be your bagel mule. And I love that idea,” says Barrow.

The concept behind Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish began in 2016, when Barrow started noticing small bagel bakeries popping up in every town she visited. She initially planned a bagel road-trip book, with recipes. But when the pandemic started, she changed course.

Barrow refers to bagel-making as “the new sourdough.” For entrepreneurs, they’re easy entry, she says: They don’t require special ingredients or equipment (combination and deck ovens work). For home bakers, they offer a new avenue for discovery.

“A bagel is iconic. It’s chewy. It’s crackly. It’s slightly sweet. It’s got all those great qualities, and there’s nothing else quite like it,” says Barrow. “To me, it’s the perfect bread.”

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