From My Mother's Kitchen by Mimi Sheraton

It has a springy soft crumb and a floury crust, and they don’t keep long at all. The dough of bagels and bialys is very similar - both are chewy and intense - but bagels have a crisp outer shell that comes from boiling them before they’re baked, and bialys have a soft, chewy crust. Two years ago: Rich Buttermilk Waffles and Arugula Ravioli And although I will never know if they do the originals any justice, we thought they were perfect - chewy and soft, onions caramelized and impossible to resist. Because they didn’t require boiling before baking, they were especially easy to make. I was thrilled to discover that Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Bread Bible had a version, and that she learned her recipe and technique from a baker at Kossar’s. As well, most of them shouldn’t, as the state of the current bialy in New York City, is often less than ideal - most are spongy with weak indentations, and if you get more than two scrap of onion in the center, you’ve beaten the odds.Īs you can see, bialys are crying out to be made at home, and out of the blue, likely due to a rare combination of deadlines having been met and having already gone to the gym, I decided Thursday was the day. You’ve probably heard of bagels, I’m sure, but bialys, often sold in the same shops, but usually relegated to a neglected lower shelf, rarely get much love. If you’re not from New York City, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. I hadn’t realized exactly how scarce they were, and became a little obsessed.

Although though the book is true to the subject at hand - bialys - the subtext is really about the narratives from the scattered remnants of Bialystok - only a handful survived the pogroms and Holocaust - recalling what they can about the rolls they used to make and eat. It was reading The Bialy Eaters, Mimi Sheraton’s pursuit of the chewy, onion-topped kuchen from Bialystok, Poland to Paris, Argentina and Miami Beach, Florida, that was a turning point for me. Oh, and that they were excellent toasted with salted butter. The bagel shop where I briefly worked in high school had us front-end people take bagels off the machine rollers, pinch together the centers, schmear them with the onion filling and leave them on a tray for the professionals to bake, and that was about far as I’d considered them - a bagel variant. Growing up, I never gave bialys much thought.

From My Mother's Kitchen by Mimi Sheraton