We fantasized for a moment about quitting our jobs and opening a bakery. Images courtesy of the Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives and St. Beyond the Mountain: True Tales about Montreal. Montreal: Montreal Jewish Publication Society, 2006. That day, some friends dropped by for brunch. Baron Byng to Bagels: Tales of Jewish Montreal. Graf’s, but exceptional for a bagel from a home kitchen. The bagels came out exactly how I wanted them: crunchy and brown with a glossy sheen, a nice chew and soft inside. The water turned a disturbing yellow.īut after I transferred the bagels to the oven and baked them for 20 minutes, flipping them halfway through the cooking, I knew my quest had come to an end. I dropped the lye into the stainless steel pot of water, brought it to a boil and added the bagels. (For safe measurements, brave bagel makers should always weigh the lye with a scale). Using a kitchen scale, I weighed a pot with 2,200 grams of water (a bit more than a half-gallon) and determined I needed about 3 grams of lye, which amounted to a small pinch. Graf told me in an email to weigh the water and the lye so the chemical accounted for 0.15 percent of the solution.

The next morning, I drank a cup of coffee and put on my safety gear. My friend had gone through a pretzel-making phase and had hoped to experiment with boiling in lye, but never had the guts to open the bottle labeled in red: “Poison: Causes Severe Burns.” By coincidence, I had dinner days later with a friend who had an unopened bottle in his closet. “It’s the tragedy of the food commons,” he said, referring to the simplification of home recipes. Here I was trying to perfect the bagel and working with a G-rated version of his recipe. (A Times reporter revised his recipe in 2012 to include baking soda, a common alternative to lye.) “It’s really caustic.” So his home recipe instructs the baker to boil the bagels in salted water. “There is that liability there of, like, ‘Oh, don’t poison yourself,’” Mr.

Baron Byng to Bagels by Joe King