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Published: January 29th 2008
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When I visit someplace new, I like to see and I like to eat. For the eating part, I go for street food: cheap, tasty, and local. Here that means falafel and shwarma (the Israeli version of gyros, minus the yogurt sauce, naturally, which wouldn’t be kosher). More about them some other time. Here I want to talk about the bakeries. It’s hard to find a stand-alone bakery in the States anymore, and I don’t even remember many from my childhood. All that remains of bakeries these days is a small corner in the big-box supermarkets. Here bakeries are as numerous as Starbucks in Seattle. It’s important to have goals in life. One of my goals is to sample each bakery.
Bakeries stock a number of items, some of which are familiar and some of which aren’t. Among the familiar are bagels. Over my lifetime, I’ve watched as bagels in the US have become transformed into something I barely recognize. Sure they have retained the same basic shape. But there the similarity ends. As bagels have gone mainstream they’ve undergone the all American makeover. They’ve been supersized—it seems they’re as big as half a loaf of bread. And they’ve lost
all their personality—they have all the flavor and character of commercial white bread. Even specialty shops churn out bland bagel products. Aside from their gigantic size, I suspect that the main problem with US bagels is the way they are cooked. Unlike breads, bagels are traditionally cooked in a two-step process. After shaping, they’re dropped in boiling water for a bit before baking. Boiling removes some of the starch on the bagel’s surface, leaving behind the gluten protein. It is the gluten that gives a good bagel that characteristic chewiness. The soft doughy texture of US bagels leads me to believe that manufacturers have omitted the boiling step. Here in Israel bagels are much smaller, just as I remember from childhood. And they’re clearly still boiled. I’d forgotten how satisfying a really chewy bagel is. By the time I finished my first one, my jaw hurt. That’s chewy!
Of course, there are the assorted sweet pastries we’re all familiar with, such as cheese Danish and others goodies filled with fruit preserves, chopped nuts, or (my favorite) poppy seed filling. They are indeed good. What most Americans are probably not familiar with, however, are bourekas. These are tasty little pastries
made of filo dough stuffed with various fillings, such as mushroom, eggplant, potato, cabbage, or cheese. Delicious, but beware if you’re watching your waistline.
My favorite bakery also makes what I guess you’d call a donut. These aren’t the cakey sort that you find at the supermarket or Dunkin’ Donuts. They start with a yeast dough. It think it’s bread dough as the gluten is really well developed. The resulting donut has a really satisfying chewiness—not tough, but it bites back. No fancy fillings or toppings to obscure that delicious fried dough flavor, just a sprinkling of granulated sugar. They’re quite big—bigger than I need. Nevertheless, I always manage to finish them. Scrumptious.
Surprisingly, one bakery item we have not been able to find is good bread. When I mentioned this to Amotz, Betsy’s host professor, he countered that the situation is much better than in the US. He described American bread as a white sponge. Clearly he hasn’t been there in a while. Here all the bread, even the fresh bakery bread, tastes like the commercial supermarket variety. The challah is particularly disappointing. Attractive—it’s braided—but otherwise just as flavorless as white bread. We don’t buy commercial bread
anymore. I started baking my own.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is a confection called "קרמבו"(crembo). A crembo is a cookie topped with a gigantic dollop of marshmallow cream or fake whipped cream. The cookie/cream combination is then covered with a thin hard chocolate crust similar to the one that surrounds chocolate ice cream bars. (See cross-section in the photograph.) Crembos remind me of a ding-dong without the cake. Only the good stuff, I suppose, is how kids look at it. Commercially produced, you won’t find crembos in bakeries. They can only be purchased at supermarkets. A seasonal item, they are sold only in winter. Crembos have a history. When German immigrants arrived in Israel they wanted something sweet to snack on in the winter. Ice cream is fine in summer, but definitely will not do in winter. To satisfy their sweet tooth they decided to recreate a confection from the old country, the crembo. I don’t know what the original version tasted like, but I don’t like today’s crembo. They’re icky sweet. In fact, that’s all they are—sweet—there’s really no other flavor. In my opinion, the Germans should have left them in the old country. The
most interesting thing about crembos is their name, which in Hebrew means “cream inside it,” an apt description.
These pictures (except my bread and the crembo) are all from "האופה" ("The Baker") in Central Carmel, our favorite bakery. We really wanted a photo of the owner. He has even less hair than I do. But he was too shy.
Weather report: Cold spell for the last two weeks. Highs: 10-15 degrees Celsius (50-60 degrees Fahrenheit); Lows: 0-10 degrees Celsius (32-50 degrees Fahrenheit). Some mornings we saw frost in the wadis. Winter storm today, with strong gusts of wind and heavy rain. I completely blew out an umbrella.
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