“King Arthur Baking” or “King Arthur Faking”?

Back in ’09, I complained about a recipe for doughnuts. I was on the mailing list for the King Arthur flour company, and they sent a recipe for no-fry doughnuts. I wrote a post saying how mortified I was. Not the most serious post ever.

Of course, you can probably make a decent doughnut without frying it, but I don’t know why you would, since fried doughnuts are the stuff of legend. Krispy Kreme fries. What else do you need to know?

My mother loved Farm Store cake doughnuts, and I thought they were okay, too, but come on. Fried is FRIED.

Maybe they were fried, now that I think about it. I just assumed they were baked.

A guy claiming to work for King Arthur Baking somehow found my blog and wrote this in a comment:

“Dumbest junk email” – WOW, far as I know we’ve never been characterized that way before. A first! Thanks, Steve. As for baked doughnuts – to each his own, huh? Not my favorite, but actually many, many customers love them, so, what the heck? To each his own. Thanks for the mention. You know what they say, even bad PR is PR… PJ _____, King Arthur Flour baker/blogger

For me, this was one of the weirder moments in a long history of blogging.

It just occurred to me: maybe he wrote the doughnut recipe.

I don’t know if King Arthur still has his Internet knights out there Googling and defending the realm, but if he does, I will probably hear from them again. Here goes.

It is not easy to get good bagels where I live. The best grocery here is Publix. Their bakery’s bagels are acceptable, which means good enough to be considered bagels and eaten when nothing else is on hand. Every store has a little box full of bagels from the Einstein Bros. chain, and they’re fine, but as I said, the box is little, and if you don’t get there early, you can forget about getting a plain bagel, which is the only kind of bagel Publix stocks that works with cream cheese and Nova.

I think the old Jews who live around here rush to the stores every morning and clean them out.

It’s a good theory. They keep leaving the blueberry and raisin bagels. The sweet ones. Old Jews get diabetes.

There is a bagel joint in town, and they serve real bagels. It’s a long drive, though. By the way, they don’t serve smoked fish. Bagels, but no lox. No Nova. I’m serious. What is wrong with them? Salmon is the reason bagels were invented. Or it should be.

Yesterday I got fed up and decided to find out how hard it was to make a bagel. I remembered something about having to boil them, and it sounded like a hassle, but I had been pushed to the brink of sanity.

I made the mistake of going to the King Arthur site, because its recipe came up in search results.

King Arthur makes hugely-hyped flour. Is it really better than everyone else’s flour? Take a deep breath. Ready? I don’t think so. I buy their bread flour often, but the truth is that it doesn’t seem to be anything special. Sometimes I buy Pillsbury or Gold Medal or whatever that brand is that’s above King Arthur and the left at my local Publix stores. Everything comes out fine.

Back when I was making large numbers of pizzas and garlic rolls for a church that enjoyed using my free labor, I tried just about every flour you can name. Caputo 00. Bouncer. Golden Tiger. Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto. All Trumps. I can’t recall them all. I tried King Arthur bread flour, known affectionately to pizzaiolos as “KABF.”

My favorite flour was Primo Gusto, a cheap store brand. Naturally, the last time I went to Gordon Food Service, they didn’t have it. Maybe they discontinued it. This happens every time I find a product I like. It even happens with vaccines. I took the Johnson & Johnson clot shot, and now it’s restricted.

Actifed? Gone. Sudafed? Gone, unless I want to sign a government list when I buy it. My favorite tennis shoes? Gone. Wait…there must be some other things…

Okay, maybe not everything gets discontinued, but sometimes it feels like it.

Primo Gusto is a high-gluten flour, and KABF is, of course, bread flour. Whether one has more or less gluten than the other, I can’t say without Googling, and I am too lazy, but high-gluten flours, as a group, are supposed to be a bit more gluteny than bread flours.

Gluten makes bread chewy and crusty. I like high-gluten flour in pizza. Primo Gusto is a high-gluten flour.

To get back to the point, I never got results that made me think King Arthur was a big deal.

I remember trying a pizza dough recipe they suggested. It had baking powder in it for extra oven spring. It did not impress.

Later I learned that you don’t put baking powder in pizza dough to make it rise higher in the oven. You use the proper hydration (67% will work), you use the right temperature, and when you set your dough out to proof, you stretch the ball and fold it inward a few times to make the outer surface taut. This works.

Why didn’t the people at King Arthur know this? Amateurs on a pizza forum did.

I tried their bagel recipe, using their flour, and the bagels sort of flattened out in the oven. Inside, they were maybe 20% more like bagels than, say, Kaiser rolls. To me, they were not bagels.

Before their web knights errant show up to challenge me to jousts, let me say that I lived in Miami and New York, so yes, I know what a bagel should be.

King Arthur’s site is full of good reviews. Their bagel recipe has a 4.5-star rating and 343 reviews. A mystery.

Guess where I went to find out what was wrong? A pizza forum. The guys on the forum may not be paid professionals (for the most part), but they are very serious, they put in the oven time, and they post their results. One of them went on to open a blockbuster pizzeria in Atlanta.

Some of these guys have huge pro ovens in their homes.

I did not go to Serious Eats to see what Kenji Lopez-Alt had to say. He went to the pizza forum to find out how to make pizza, and he still got it wrong. His restaurant gets middling reviews. I got a good Caesar dressing recipe from his site, and I think there is some good stuff there, but I trust the pizza guys more.

A bagel isn’t a pizza, but a person who will make dozens of pizzas every year to get his recipe just right will also put in the effort to get bagels right.

Here’s my tentative conclusion: King Arthur got the hydration wrong, along with some other things.

First, I think they use the wrong flour. Maybe they don’t make a high-gluten flour. That might explain it. The purpose of their site is not to help you make good food. They don’t care about that. The site’s purpose is to sell flour. I believe any crusty, tough bread should be made with high-gluten flour.

Second, they call for 63% hydration. NOBODY puts that much water in a bagel. Water makes bread soft. Obviously.

I have read that factories that make really bad bagels (Thomas’, Lender’s, et alia) use high hydration. I forget why. Maybe to prevent old customers from losing their dentures in front of other people and suing them. Lawyers ruin everything.

I seem to recall reading that it’s because proper bagel dough is hard for factories to work with. It’s stiff.

Third, the bagels don’t taste like bagels, so I think the dough and water bath ingredients are wrong.

A guy on the pizza forum has a recipe that gets high marks, so I am changing the King Arthur recipe to be closer to it. He puts baking soda and salt in his water bath. That seems smart to me, because the outside of a bagel should taste a little different from the inside.

King Arthur says to put white sugar in the water bath along with malt syrup. I think this is wrong. The forum guy doesn’t use sugar, and why would he? It would reduce the malt flavor.

Fourth, and this is insane, King Arthur calls for a TABLESPOON of yeast in 400 grams of flour. That’s three teaspoons. If you listen to them, all you will taste will be bitter yeast. NOBODY puts that much yeast in dough. I have a recipe that uses about 400 grams of flour, and it calls for ONE SIXTH of a tablespoon. Less would be better, but I don’t want to wait a year for dough to rise.

The yeast thing is a rookie mistake. It’s not a matter of preference. It’s not a case of “Reasonable minds may differ.” It’s like putting pepper on Cap’n Crunch.

I will admit that I did not pay any attention to this recommendation when I made “bagels.” I knew it was crazy. I thought maybe it was a typo.

So what about the great reviews on the site?

Here’s something I have to keep telling myself over and over: most people have no idea what good food tastes like. They can tell what other people say tastes good, and they get in line and agree, but only a small percentage of people can tell good food from mediocre or bad food. That does not prevent them from putting in their less-than-two-cents’ worth.

You can’t listen to professional cooks, either.

As I have said before, even most trained cooks…can’t. How many bad restaurant meals have you had? Hundreds or thousands. How many were made by cooking school graduates? A big percentage.

Back when I was a churchgoer, I knew three trained chefs and one Jamaican guy who was self-taught. The trained chefs were what I would call “airline-grade” cooks, but the Jamaican guy’s food was dazzling. The trained chefs asked me for tips, and I have no training at all.

Back in Miami, there is a guy who calls himself Zak the Baker. He started supplying baked goods for Whole Foods, which used to have very, very nice stuff. They sold excellent croissants, pain au chocolate, Danish rolls, and so on. Whole Foods publicized Zak’s name to impress people.

I strolled in after Zak came along, thinking he had to be wonderful if Whole Foods was telling people he made their food, and that was the last time I ever bought their baked goods. They were baked no-goods. Worthless. Flavorless.

Zak promotes himself. He uses his first name as a trademark. When it’s mentioned, it’s supposed to impress. Whatever. The food was not good, and I quit buying it.

You can’t trust a cook’s reputation, especially when he’s a self-promoter.

I went to two Mario Batali restaurants: Lupa and Mozza. Both were awful. I went to Marco Pierre White’s restaurant in Dublin. The food was borderline gross. Incompetently prepared. Stale.

I’ll bet White can’t cook. Michelin stars? Don’t care. Things can be bought. Corruption is real. And maybe Michelin critics aren’t that good at what they do.

How much does a Michelin spy get paid? How much does money does a chef make from a star? Things to think about.

I went to Pride and Joy, a barbecue restaurant that belonged to Myron Mixon, reality TV’s barbecue king. It was just plain bad. He himself ended up distancing himself from it, after laying down a line of smack he later had to eat.

Better the smack than the food.

I don’t understand Zak. If you have time to build a huge business and promote your name, don’t you have time to learn how to cook?

Today I’m making some bagels with 55% hydration, along with some other changes, and whether they’re good or not, they will surely be better than King Arthur’s unholy toroids.

I will eventually get this right, just like I got white bread right. I taught my wife how to make white bread, and now we always have the finest white bread on God’s green Earth, for maybe a dollar a loaf. This bread makes the angels jealous. One day soon, we will have delicious bagels to set beside it.