Sunday, October 07, 2007

Cloning The Bagel

I mentioned that there are a number of people looking to home-clone the Panera Bread Cinnamon Crunch Bagel. I don't see where it ought to be all that difficult -- after all, Panera lists the ingredients right on their site --

Ingredients: Unbleached flour (wheat flour, malted barley flour), water, vanilla chips (sugar, partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, whey [a milk protein], nonfat milk, mono and diglycerides, lecithin emulsifiers, pure vanilla), cinnamon drops (sugar, palm oil, cinnamon, non fat dry milk, soya lecithin as an emulsifier), bagel base (sugar, salt, malt barley flour, contains 2% or less of: molasses, mono and diglycerides, ascorbic acid, L-cysteine, azodicarbonamide [ADA], enzyme, ammonium chloride), brown sugar, vanilla (vanilla, water, propylene glycol, alcohol, artificial flavors and caramel color), honey, yeast, margarine (palm oil, water, soybean oil, mono- and diglycerides, artificial flavor, colored with annatto, calcium disodium EDTA as a preservative, vitamin A palmitate), topping (sugar, cinnamon, modified food starch, soybean oil).

How hard could it be?

4 comments:

Molly said...

Just out of curiosity, have you ever tried to make plane bagels? Baby, it ain't easy.

But I do get your humor. Ahhh, how I love Panera. When we lived in St. Louis, we lived about 2 blocks from the dough making facility for Panera (aka St. Louis Bread Co.). It was awesome.

Cerulean Bill said...

Well, Molly, that's a funny story.

Years ago, I tried a recipe for bagels. Part of the sequence was to dunk them for a couple of minutes in a pot of simmering water. Just after I put the first bagel in the pot, I got a call which irritated me severely, to the point that I stormed out and went for a drive to cool down.

When I got back, the bagel was the size of a kid's bike tire.

Molly Jane said...

HAHAHAHAHAHA. Thats awesome. Mine ended up tiny and tough.

Cerulean Bill said...

This one was quite impressive. Soft and soggy, of course, but still: quite impressive.

There's a recipe for bagels in that Bakers Manual, and I'm thinking of trying it, but what I'd really like to do is make soft biscotti like the ones made by the defunct company in Maine. The company name was something like Two Ladies From Maine, or TwoCrazyLadies, something like that. The biscotti were on the expensive side, but they were awfully good -- almost like a firm cake.