Working Away to make Cambodian Bagels

Raisin Cinnamon Bagel The smiley face of my cinnamon raisin bagel rolled in brown sugar

When I accepted the Workaway gig in Cambodia’s Otres Beach, the last thing I thought I’d be learning how to bake was a New York bagels. I’ve lived on both US coasts, and the doughy bagels on sale in California can’t hold a candle to the classic chewy NY bagel that are boiled before they’re baked.

I have vivid memories of my first New York egg bagel on 23rd Street and 8th Avenue. It was overly toasted and dripping with butter—and just what the doctor ordered after a night out on the town. The bagel shop wrapped the bagels in grease proof paper before cutting the bagel in half, and I loved the feel of the hot bagels in my brown paper bag, and preyed the butter didn’t seep onto my clothes before I completed the short walk to our brownstone walk-up on 22nd Street.

Our Otres Kitchen

A few decades later, and here I am, learning how to create the classic NY bagel in our Otres Beach test kitchen.

An outdoor kitchen may seem like a great idea, but when it’s 100 degrees and 100% humidity it doesn’t matter that your kitchen has 360 degrees of ventilation, it’s still as hot as hell in there.

I’ve worked in professional kitchens before, but it had been a while since I’d used a industrial mixer and oven. Having the right equipment and lots of space sure make baking enjoyable—despite the heat.

Otres Beach kitchen for making bagels
Otres Beach outside kitchen
My first batch of NY bagels … Sesame and Onion

We tried a couple of different techniques for forming the bagels. One way was to create a dough circle and punch a hole in the middle with your thumb and prize the dough apart. The other was to create a sausage shape and join the two ends to make a circle. I preferred the look of the first method, but the other method is more traditional.

Chunky NY Bagels tasted as good as they looked
My second batch of bagels – mastering the larger centre hole

We were able to buy cream cheese in Otres, but no sign of smoked salmon, so I had to make do with a couple of slices of tomato.

My perfect specimen of a New York sesame bagel

This sesame bagel above was the one I was most proud of! Perfectly round, and bronzed to perfection. It looked too good to eat—but eat it I did.

It isn’t a speedy process to make bagels. You have to let the dough rise, beat it down, and then let it rise again. But it was so worth the effort. I lost count of the number of batches I made. And when we sold them on Saturdays at the Otres Market, they flew off the shelves.

Recipe for how to make the perfect NY style bagel

Now, no matter where I am living in the world, I know I can just get my baking head on and whip up a few bagels to get that New York feeling, and trigger Cambodian memories.

Read about my pastry challenges while making quiche in Cambodia.

Volunteering through @Workaway helped me to build my cooking skills. I can now make bagels. Click To Tweet

Find out more about volunteering through Workaway



Flashpacking through Cambodia ebook cover for Baby Boomers on a Budget
Flashpacking through Cambodia

Flashpacking through Cambodia: For Baby Boomers on a Budget is my latest Roving Jay travel guide full of travel tips, advice, and sample itineraries for flash packers who want the back packing experience without foregoing some of life’s creature comforts – like a comfortable bed, a hot shower, free wi-fi, and somewhere to plug your electric toothbrush in.

I spent almost three months backpacking around Cambodia in 2017/2018 to research this travel guide, and I share insights and first hand knowledge of tourist traps and off-the-beaten-path discoveries. We ate street food, drank 50c beers, and travelled by train, bus, minivan and tuktuk to identify the best ways to get from A to B.

If you’d like to receive a free Review Copy ahead of the general public release, please click here.

Here’s my Cambodia posts on this blog:

 


 

Author: Roving Jay

Jay is a project manager who swapped corporate life for a nomadic existence as a travel writer. She works with authors and entrepreneurs to help them achieve their self-publishing goals and reach their target audience through content marketing. Jay has published a series of travel guides, a travel memoir, and nonfiction books about travel writing. She housesits and volunteers around the globe with her husband, a Hollywood set painter, and she’s never more that 10 paces away from a wi-fi connection.

20 thoughts on “Working Away to make Cambodian Bagels

  1. Love New York bagels and would have loved to have got hold of some when I was living in SEASia. Smoked salmon was always a bit tricky to find in Cambodia, you need to cross over to Thailand for that! That sesame bagel looks amazing – very impressed!

  2. I simply love the idea of an outdoor kitchen, even though Im from Sweden 😉 But we actually use our grill to barbacue all year around 😀

  3. Love the whole concept of making bagels in Cambodia. When you mentioned the heat in the kitchen I felt for you! I know what that Cambodian heat and humidity is like.

    1. The last thing you want to be doing is cooking in that heat, especially when it’s a big industrial size oven. But any weight I might have put on with eating too many bagels was lost in blood sweat and tears!

  4. Yes, when you really love baking, the heat and humidity don’t matter. What a wonderful experience you had! Those sesame bagels look delicious! Cambodia is in my bucket list. 🙂

    1. We got used to cooking in that heat eventually. The humidity ruined my pastry making skills, but didn’t seem to have an adverse affect on the bagel dough.

  5. These look so yummy! I have never tried to bake bagels. If you can manage in a makeshift outdoor kitchen, maybe I should try to bake some in my regular kitchen 🙂 Cooking outside looks like a lot of fun 🙂

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