Babka and bagels

                                                              BABKA AND BAGELS
 

                                                                                                                                                                                      As many people have done during the pandemic, I've been experimenting with sourdough baking. I've experimented with baking many things I've previously not baked before, and my baking game has improved. My most recent experiment was cinnamon babka. What is babka? It's traditionally a yeast raised, sweet, buttery braided bread/cake, typically done in either chocolate or cinnamon. It's time consuming but easy to make. And ridiculously addictive. It's much more commonly found in New York area bakeries, particularly Jewish, Russian, and Polish bakeries. There are many babka recipes on the internet, sourdough and otherwise. When you're trying to keep a sourdough starter alive, you have to feed it regularly with flour and water. And if you keep feeding the starter without using it, eventually it will take over your entire refrigerator. Thus I've been baking something about once a week. I'd buy babka if there were anywhere in Renton to buy it, but haven't found it.  In the "baked goods that start with the letter b" category, I've also made sourdough bagels. But bagels are labor intensive, and The Red Tea Room in the Renton highlands bakes good ones, available for pickup on Sundays. I recently tried their plain ones. Plain bagels are a good way to judge a bagel, because you're just tasting the bagel, and not the toppings. Mediocre bagels places hide the mediocrity of the bagels with plenty of toppings, so you can't really taste the bagels. If you get a plain bagels from a place that isn't good, it will too often resemble round white bread with a hole in the middle. Anyway, the Red Tea Room's plain bagels are really good. In fact, I think I like them better than any of the Red Tea Room's other bagels. Toppings fall off, so you're paying extra for what lands on the kitchen counter. The Red Tea Room's plain bagels have that great combination of crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, so good that they don't even need butter or cream cheese when they're fresh. Now if they would only start baking babka.