Bialys

Some time ago I stumbled across a post on Bread cetrea. about Bialy. They looked yummy and while reading through the recipe they even seemed quite easy to bake.

Since I was looking for a quick bread recipe this week – ran out of bread and had not much time to deal with fuzzy doughs and rising times – I remembered the bookmark and and was very interested about the story behind these funny named “rolls”.

This is what I found on wikipedia:

Bialy, a Yiddish word short for bialystoker, from Białystok, a city in Poland, is a small roll that is a traditional dish in Polish Ashkenazi cuisine. A traditional bialy has a diameter of up to 15 cm (6 inches) and is a chewy yeast roll similar to a bagel. Unlike a bagel, which is boiled before baking, a bialy is simply baked, and instead of a hole in the middle it has a depression. Before baking, this depression is filled with diced onions and other ingredients, including (depending on the recipe) garlic, poppy seeds, or bread crumbs.

The name bialy is short for bialystoker kuchen (Bialystok’s Cake). The bialy was formerly little known outside of New York City, but has started to move into the larger market. They were originally brought into the United States by Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The bialy was first marketed in the United States during the early 1900s in the state of New York by Harry Cohen, a proprietor of a bagel (and later bialy) establishment.

In 2002, former New York Times food writer Mimi Sheraton wrote a book dedicated to the bialy, called The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World. She examined bialy making and used Kossar’s Bialys as the background, and its long-time union bakers as key references for her research that took her to Poland in search of the original bialy bakers.

source: wikipedia

On further reserach I found out that there are far more stories around this “rolls”

Here is my version adapted from here:

Onion Smear: one medium onion, pureed and cooekd in a skillet for about 5-10 minutes ove medium heat until they are light golden brown.

I put all of the ingredients togehter in a large bowl and whisked with a wooden spoon until everything was mixed well. Then I kneaded the dough on the kitchen counter for about 10 minutes (be careful when using spelt flour not to overknead the dough).

Back into the lage bowl, covered with cling flim and let rest until nearly doubled in size.
Transfer to the kitchen counter again. Divide into 12 equal parts, let rest again for some minutes.

Then I followed this Instruction:
“Using a thumb, each dough round was then flattened in the center and then stretched outward from the center until each piece was approximately 5″ in diameter, resembling mini pizza shells. A thin membrane of dough should stretch across the center of each dough piece. A scant ¼ teaspoon of the onion schmear is then thinly spread over the center of each dough piece”.

In the oven they went at 200°C for about 10 minutes.

The first bialy went into my tummy right after they had cooled down enough not to burn my tongue. Mmmmmmh YUMMY!

I’d like to submit these to Susan’s Yeastspotting this week.