Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [9]
3. Brush each side of each bagel slice with the oil. Bake for 20 minutes, until crispy and tan, then salt to taste. Cool and store in a sealed plastic bag or a cookie tin.
One bagel yields about 3 ounces of chips
The classic partners to a good bagel: some cream cheese and a few slices of cured salmon.
CREAM CHEESE
To make cream cheese, you need to order a tiny and inexpensive packet of something called mesophilic culture from a cheesemaking supply company (see Appendix). This packet will produce many pounds of cheese, and not just cream cheese, but Camembert, cheddar, and Taleggio, should you get ambitious. (See pages 196-207.) It lasts indefinitely in the freezer. You also need a small bottle of liquid rennet, equally cheap, useful, and long-lived.
I love homemade cream cheese, which is fluffy, snowy, and tart; by comparison, store-bought seems gummy and inert. But there are mixed feelings in our household. Once I watched Mark reach past a bowl of homemade cream cheese to pull out a silver-wrapped brick of Philadelphia to spread on Owen’s bagel. “Why did you buy that?” I asked. I would have described my tone of voice as “sharp.” Mark probably would have said “shrill.”
“Owen says the homemade cream cheese is too sour,” Mark replied.
It’s not sour, but it is tangy.
Make it or buy it? Try it once and decide for yourself.
Hassle: You will be amazed by how simple this is.
Cost comparison: Less than half the price per ounce of Kraft Philadelphia. Even made with premium organic milk from a local dairy, homemade cream cheese costs less than Kraft, which is neither organic nor local. Nor, in my view, as delicious.
1 quart whole milk
1 quart half-and-half
¼ teaspoon mesophilic culture
2 drops liquid rennet
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1. Cooking equipment should always be clean, but cleanliness is especially vital when you’re making cheese. In a very clean stainless-steel pot, over very low heat, combine the milk and half-and-half. Heat it to about 80 degrees F, barely lukewarm. You don’t want the milk hot; you’re just trying to take the refrigerator chill off. Remove from the heat.
2. Sprinkle the culture over the milk. To mix, gently lift a slotted spoon up and down beneath the surface of the milk to draw the cultures down and help them permeate the entire pot of milk.
3. Add the rennet and again stir with the up-and-down motion. Cover the pot, find a quiet corner where no one will disturb the mixture, and let it sit at room temperature for 24 hours.
4. Place a colander over a large bowl and line the colander with cheesecloth. Gently ladle in the curd. Cover with a clean towel and let it drain for 8 hours or so at room temperature, until the cheese is thick and has ceased to drip. (Store the whey in a jar in the refrigerator for up to 10 days to use in bagels or bread.)
5. Stir the salt into the creamy cheese. Scoop the cheese into a container and store, tightly covered, in the refrigerator. Cream cheese does not improve with age, so try to eat it within a week.
Makes 1½ pounds
WHY IS KOSHER SALT CALLED KOSHER?
Kosher salt has large, flaky crystals that are particularly effective at drawing blood from meat to render it kosher under Jewish dietary law. A more accurate name would have been “koshering salt.” Other salts, such as sea salt, may be kosher—but they’re not “kosher salt.”
CURED SALMON
There are two types of smoked salmon: Hot-smoked salmon, opaque and rust-colored, has been cooked, as the name suggests, by gusts of warm smoke. Cold-smoked salmon (or lox) is supple, bright, and nearly translucent, flavored—but not cooked—by cool smoke. Lox is what you eat on bagels with cream cheese and capers on Sunday mornings. In his book Essentials of Cooking, James Peterson shows how to rig up a cold smoker by attaching some piping to a hot smoker, but this is unhelpful if you don’t have a hot smoker. Lacking either a hot smoker or a cold smoker, the closest most of us