[Sca-cooks] bagels

[Stephen Bloch]

Cadoc wrote:
>From what I remember from your low-carb bread  components, you
>substitute a good deal of gluten proteins for starches.
>
>Alkali solutions are bitter, and gluten is alkalai ( and acid ) soluble.
>Your extra gluten is absorbing the alkalai and then it is baked into
>your bread.  Unless you used a lot of potash to make lye water,
>your lye solution wasn't very strong and the ph wasn't very high.

That makes sense.  Thanks for that bit of science!  I'll definitely 
try it with normal dough some time.

>Your low carb bread is an alkalai sponge :-)  albiet a tasty one no doubt.

Tasty as long as you don't boil it in alkali solution :-)

Marian said something about gluten content.  I'm using hard red 
winter wheat, AFAIK, and (as Cadoc points out above) adding CUPS of 
wheat gluten, so this is about the most high-gluten bread you'll ever 
see.  It comes out a little sponge-y (though certainly recognizable 
as bread) under normal circumstances.

-- 
                                     John Elys
          (the artist formerly known as mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib)
                                 mka Stephen Bloch
                                 sbloch at adelphi.edu