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Risky Baking: It’s Hard to Make a Perfect Bagel Without Lye

Bagels made by Brian X. Chen at his apartment in San Francisco.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — I hunched over the stove wearing protective eyewear and rubber gloves, boiling a pot of water laced with a toxic, corrosive chemical.

I wasn’t trying to dissolve a body like Walter White in “Breaking Bad.” I wanted to recreate the perfect East Coast bagel, the kind with a glossy brown, crunchy crust and pillowy crumb, the kind I’ve found to be elusive here in San Francisco, where airy buns with holes try to pass for the real thing.

The bubbling caldron was the final step in a three-month baking saga that was as maddening as it was gratifying. The good news is it only took me 300 bagels to nail it. The frustrating news is that the key to nailing it had been just across the Bay Bridge all along.

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Following a recipe by Dan Graf of Baron Baking in Oakland, Calif., Mr. Chen carefully weighed all of his bagel ingredients, including what amounted to a tiny pinch of lye added to the water before boiling.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

My journey of 300 bagels began in May and became an office ritual. A native Californian who spent only two years in New York (long enough to become indoctrinated with East Coast bagel and pizza snobbery) I complained bitterly about missing my blistery gold, crunchy salt bagel with a sun-dried tomato schmear from Ess-a-Bagel in Midtown Manhattan. No matter. I would make my own.

Every week after filing my technology column for the business section, I would treat my colleagues with results of my experimentation. After a few weeks, I thought I had perfected it.

I told my editor. She told the Food section. They invited me to prove it. I submitted my recipe, overnighted some bagels to my colleagues and prepared to write a how-to article.

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Mr. Chen made 300 bagels before landing on a recipe he was certain was a winner.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

But the Food editors told me to wait just a minute: A recipe tester for The New York Times (and the author of a pizza cookbook) was going to try to beat my bagel. Better yet, the tester would bake my bagels and four contenders, and let a panel of bagel snobs at The Times judge whose were best.

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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After boiling them, he baked them for 20 minutes. “The bagels came out exactly how I wanted them,” Mr. Chen wrote, “crunchy and brown with a glossy sheen, a nice chew and soft inside.”Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

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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Initially, Mr. Chen, left, was in bitter denial when a panel of bagel snobs determined that Mr. Graf, right, made a better bagel.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

“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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An assortment of Mr. Graf’s bagels.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

“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

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Risky Pursuit of Real Bagels. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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