In the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook, there are a couple of savoury recipes that have caught my eye. One of them is the kimchi blue cheese croissant, but it requires a lot of commitment, to quote Chritina Tosi, it's not for softbodies. I'm pretty sure it's delicious, since I love blue cheese and I like kimchi. I recently bought a jar of it, probably because in a corner of my mind, I am planning to make the recipe soon.
Another one is this bagel bomb recipe, because 1) it's relatively easy and 2) it involves cream cheese, scallions and bacon. What more do you need? It makes a great snack or savoury breakfast, it's great as an accompaniment to soup or salad, you could even make it with kids.
To start, you need two things : the "mother dough", the basic bread dough used for all the other recipes in the book (croissants, bun pie, etc.) and the cream cheese plugs, which are the frozen centers of the buns. For the mother dough recipe click here and scroll down. It yields a very soft and sticky dough so be prepared to use flour or oil to avoid a sticky mess.
The plugs are just cream cheese, a bit of scallion or spring onion green, fried bacon and its juice, a pinch of salt and a teaspoon of sugar. I made a vegetarian version using bits of gouda in place of bacon. I also used bacon fillet so one bagel bomb comes at about 6 propoints each. I used spring onion tops that I regrew thanks to something I saw on Pinterest!
After you have shaped all the buns, you brush some eggwash on top and sprinkle a mix of white and black sesame seeds, onion and garlic powder and salt.
ALL of my bagel bombs lived up to their name and exploded in the oven (not all over the place, but the filling spilled out and they looked more like volcanoes, btw there's another recipe called volcanoes in the book...). I think it's because something is wrong with my freezer and the plugs weren't frozen solid, they were just cold. I also made two plain buns with sesame on top for the kids and those split as well, so perhaps I did something wrong with the dough? In any case, they weren't the perfectly round little buns sold in Momofuku, but they tasted awesome just the same!
You can watch Tosi make them here.
Comments