You know what happened: I lost. And paradoxically, the panel picked a bagel from a transplanted East Coast baker: Dan Graf, the 32-year-old owner of Baron Baking, based in Oakland, Calif.
I was in bitter denial. I tried Mr. Graf’s recipe, which was published in The Times in 2012. I baked bagels using both of our recipes. I preferred mine to his.
My bagel, a result of combining techniques from over a dozen recipes online, in cookbooks and in YouTube videos, was admittedly complicated. (I destroyed and repaired my stand mixer twice while experimenting with it.)
But I believed it was worth it. I liked the crunchy crust from boiling the bagels and baking them at a very high heat; I liked the tangy flavor from the sourdough starter.
Mr. Graf’s recipe — a combination of high-gluten flour, salt, water, malt powder and yeast boiled in a solution of salt and baking soda and then baked — was simpler, more straightforward. It resulted in a chewier crust and a nice crumb, but his bagels had a slightly yellow tint and a bitter aftertaste from the baking soda.
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I invited Mr. Graf to meet me at a cafe, where, aficionado to aficionado, we could swap our creations and politely judge each other.
Mr. Graf, a brawny-looking bearded man with glasses, called my bagel “phenomenal,” adding, “If I saw that in a store, I would buy it.” He also complimented me for the extra punch in flavor from the starter. But he noticed some cracks on the bottom half of my bagels and recommended flipping them in the oven to prevent them from drying out.
Then I ate a Baron bagel. It had a pretzel-like brown crust, a delightful chew and a rich, nutty flavor. His bagels were perfectly shaped and shiny, like something that could be on the cover of Bon Appétit.
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“Yours are definitely better,” I said. He did not disagree.
I asked Mr. Graf whether he had changed his recipe. He said no, but added that the version he offered to The Times was tailored for home kitchens. For more flavor, he mixes a starter and lets it sit for about 28 hours. This serves as a base for the dough. After the bagels are rolled and shaped, they ferment in the refrigerator for another 20 hours.
And he uses a secret ingredient: lye, or sodium hydroxide, in the water, a chemical base used for boiling pretzels, making soap and cleaning drains (that last phrase being one you don’t want to see in a sentence about food).
A tiny amount of lye dramatically increases the pH level of the water, Mr. Graf said, which results in the crispy brown crust. But use too much — or boil it in the wrong kind of pot (a stainless steel one is required) — and it could be poisonous.
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“There is that liability there of, like, ‘Oh, don’t poison yourself,’” Mr. Graf said. “It’s really caustic.” So his home recipe instructs the baker to boil the bagels in salted water. (A Times reporter revised his recipe in 2012 to include baking soda, a common alternative to lye.)
Here I was trying to perfect the bagel and working with a G-rated version of his recipe. “It’s the tragedy of the food commons,” he said, referring to the simplification of home recipes.
I was determined to try lye. By coincidence, I had dinner days later with a friend who had an unopened bottle in his closet. 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.”
I took the bottle home. The next morning, I drank a cup of coffee and put on my safety gear.
Mr. Graf told me in an email to weigh the water and the lye so the chemical accounted for 0.15 percent of the solution. 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. (For safe measurements, brave bagel makers should always weigh the lye with a scale). I dropped the lye into the stainless steel pot of water, brought it to a boil and added the bagels. The water turned a disturbing yellow.
But 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. The bagels came out exactly how I wanted them: crunchy and brown with a glossy sheen, a nice chew and soft inside. Not nearly as perfect as Mr. Graf’s, but exceptional for a bagel from a home kitchen.
That day, some friends dropped by for brunch. Not one of them was poisoned. We fantasized for a moment about quitting our jobs and opening a bakery.
But then we remembered Mr. Graf, and that his establishment delivers bagels to grocery stores and restaurants throughout the Bay Area, including a nearby Whole Foods, and that he could give Ess-a-Bagel a run for its money.
Recipe: Baron Bagels
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