The Challenge

Last week, we had a brunch at our house for the purpose of planning our next scuba diving trip to Bonaire.  This presented a problem.  One of my favorite brunches is fresh chewy bagels with smoked salmon, fresh tomatoes, mimosas, Bloody Marys, and good coffee.

I roast my own coffee now, so I've got that licked. 

It's still fresh tomato season, so no worries with that.

Mimosas and Bloody Mary's are easy...

Which brings us to the fresh chewy bagels.  I am from NY City.  I was weaned on H&H, Bagel Oasis, and Ess-a-Bagel.  Heck, even the corner bodega had the good ones.  But now I live in Massachusetts.

Big problem.  The bagels up here are big pillows of round bread.  And not very good bread at that.

I had bought Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice some time ago with the ambition of turning out tasty fresh loaves of bread, but never really got around to it.  So I cracked it open and found a recipe for bagels that he claimed was as good as the real thing.  What the heck, I gave it a try.

Oh.  My.  God.

They fulfilled my fondest wishes, despite not having high gluten flour, and a minor mishap with the stickiest parchment paper in existence (don't ask).  I made 2 dozen and they were gone in no time.  My guests had a great brunch and I had a new favorite cookbook.

I then discovered it was a lot of people's favorite cookbook, and that there was something called the BBA Challenge.  Basically, it comes to this:  bake every bread in the BBA book in order and blog, tweet, or otherwise rhapsodize about it.  SO that is what I'll be doing on this blog.  I also plan on adding in some of my other recipes and culinary misadventures.