- This place is all talk. You can't have fries without ketchup. The ketchup is inside the fries! (scoffs) - This cream cheese in this pizza bagel, it adds a whole other level of flavor. And with pizza on a bagel,
you can eat pizza any time! - Hey, what's up guys. Welcome back to Binging with Babish. For this week we seek to
elevate the widely beloved but often humble pizza bagel and fries into some inventive cartoon hoked cuisine. First thing we got to do is make bagels which we did on the previous
Steven Universe episode but I've learned a couple
tips and tricks since then. We're starting by making a sponge out of 250 grams of bread flour, one teaspoon active dry yeast and 350 grams of room temperature water which we're gonna mix into a paste, cover and let sit at room temperature for at least four hours, up to overnight if you really wanna
develop your bagels flavor. You should see some big awesome bubbles and a nice webby network of
gluten beginning to form. To this we're gonna add
25 grams of marley-- Marley bolt syrup? Barley malt syrup, 450 more grams of bread flour, and 10 grams of kosher salt. Affix dough hooks and
knead for 10 full minutes. If you want slightly
softer, less chewy bagels, better for sandwiches shoot for more like four or five minutes. Either way we should be met with a soft, silky, springy dough that we're going to form into a ball and place back in the bowl, covering and letting proof at
room temperature for one hour. The dough should poof up a little bit but not quite double in size. This shows that our yeast
is still alive and well and that our dough is ready
for division and shaping. One shortcoming of the
Steven Universe bagels is that they were hilariously small. So I'm doubling the size of the portions into pieces that weigh 130 grams from which we should
yield eight bagel balls which we're going to cover
with a moistened towel and let rest at room temperature
for another 30 minutes. Just enough time to let our gluten relax so that we can form our balls into bagels without them tearing. You could roll out and twist
your bagels, New York style. But I like to just punch a hole
in the center with my thumbs and widen the whole thing into a bagel using two spinning fingers. It's important to make
the hole a little bigger than you think that it needs to be. These guys are going to puff up a lot and like an untended ear piercing, they could close completely
if you're not careful. Rinse and repeat with
the remaining bagels. And since there's a bunch left, this is a great opportunity
to introduce Kendall Beach, our new kitchen producer. After all it's like I always say, "Forming bagels is a team sport." Yes, of course I always say that. Why would I make something like that up? After a little Hollywood handshake we are generously oiling some plastic wrap and using it to cover the bagels which we're going to fridge
for at least 24 hours. Ideally up to 72. Plenty of time to begin
the equally arduous process of making French fries. But not just any French fries. We're doing a modification
of Chef Steps modification of Heston Blumenthal's justifiably famous triple cooked chips. First we are peeling and cutting one kilogram of russet potatoes into giant ass French fries. Keeping everybody
hanging out in cool water because russets are full of starch and storing them in the water is not only going to
remove some of the starch, it's gonna keep the
potatoes from discoloring. Next up, we're making a brine in which we're going to cook our potatoes. One liter of water, 15
grams of kosher salt and 10 grams of glucose syrup. If you don't happen to have
glucose syrup lying around, you can substitute with 10
grams of granulated sugar. We're also adding two and
a half grams of baking soda which is going to raise
the pH level of the fries and help them brown. Mix everybody together until homogenous. And then we are very carefully
combining half the fries and half the brine in a vac sealed bag. Turning our vac sealer into an arcade game that we have to hit stop on before it sucks water into the mechanism and destroys your day. Ultimately, you could just
put these in a heat-safe zip top bag and suck
out all the air you can with a straw before
sealing and introducing to a 195 degree Fahrenheit sous vide bath. This just below boiling bath is going to gently and evenly cook our potatoes for 20 minutes. During which time they should cook to the point of almost falling apart and becoming very easy to crush betwixt two gloved fingers. So now we're going to very
carefully drain these guys and adjust focus on our lens so we can examine them up close. They should have a
lightly roughed up texture and should be extraordinarily fragile. So now we're going to very carefully lay them out on a wire rack, set in a rimed baking sheet making sure that they do not touch and we're gonna place them in the freezer for about 30 minutes which is going to help
drive off excess moisture. Then straight out the freezer, they're going into some peanut oil, heated to 260 degrees Fahrenheit for anywhere from five to eight minutes until they are just starting to turn blonde around the edges. Rinse and repeat with
the rest of the fries in small batches, both so they don't touch and also, so they don't
lower the temperature of the frying oil every
time you plop them in. Back onto the wire rack and
into the freezer they go for at least two hours, ideally overnight. A few days later and we're
ready to finish what we started. These bagels have been in
the fridge for 72 hours and before they can be baked, they must first be boiled in a combination of a gallon of water, one tablespoon marley bolt syrup, and one teaspoon of baking soda. Once a boil is reached, straight out the fridge and
into the water go our bagels for 20 seconds on each side. Then we're placing them on
a lightly greased wire rack set in a rimmed baking sheet and baking in a preheated
425 degree Fahrenheit oven where they're going to bake
for 20 to 25 minutes total. After about 15 minutes you're going to start seeing some spotty browning on
the outside of your bagels. Fear not we're going to give them a flip and place them in back in the oven for another five to 10 minutes until they're evenly browned all over. And you're going to see because of the long ferment in the fridge, we have an absolutely
crackling, blistered crust on the outside of our bagels. This is because of the yeast slowly producing CO2 in
the cold of the fridge. Giving us both an improved
flavor and texture. Ow, my fingers. Also, if you wants a more pronounced-- Whoa. If you want a more pronounced a bagel hole make sure that you give
them an extra stretch before they head into the water. Set those aside to cool because it's time to finish up our fries which we're going to do in a
positively decadent medium. About two quarts of duck fat heated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. carefully lower in the par fried potatoes and let them fry for
between two to five minutes until they are deeply, shatteringly
golden brown and crisp. The brine, sous vide, freeze, cook, freeze and cook again method has rewarded us with a fry that has a
glassy crisp exterior and an impossibly light
and fluffy interior despite the fries size. Why did we make fries so big? Because well, it's time to
inject them with ketchup which we're going to do by virtue of a giant scary barbecue
needle filled with ketchup. Slightly warm ketchup so
that we don't cool off the interiors of our fries too much. We're going to start
by inserting the needle the full length of the fry and slowly pull it out
whilst depressing the plunger and impregnating our fries with-- This all sounds kinda wrong. I dunno, we're filling the fries with ketchup with a long needle. And then to Steven Universify our bagel, we're first going to slice it in half and then perform a ritual that sandwich shops refer to as scooping or the act of quite literally scooping out the interiors of the bagel to make room for our cream cheese
that we're going to pipe into the now vacant cavity
of our once bready bagel. Spread it smooth so nobody knows that it's in there when served, and then we're going to top it with a generous layer of a lightly cooked San Marzano tomato sauce, obscuring our smeary surprise and giving us a platform upon which we can arrange some little pieces of fresh mozzarella cheese. These were kind of scattered
around in various dots and Xs. So that's what I'm going to emulate here. And because the idea of a cold pizza bagel is the stuff of nightmares, bake at 425 degrees Fahrenheit
for five to 10 minutes. Then we are topping with a smattering of chopped, fresh basil. Just enough to give a little
flavor and visual variety and arranging on a plate with
a couple fresh basil leaves. Then it's time to start arranging our ketchup injected French fries in a rarely seen French
fry starburst pattern. Garnish with a single
sprig of fresh parsley. And there you have it. Stevens chefy, more than
meets the eye interpretations of the two beach city favorites. First up the French fries. And to be honest, I thought
injecting them with ketchup was going to totally ruin their texture but it actually worked out pretty well. The inside stayed nice and fluffy and the outside nice and crisp with a little channel of ketchup running right through the center. The cream cheese pizza bagel was another surprising success. I thought I wasn't gonna like it. I am what you might call
a pizza bagel purist. But the addition of cream cheese added a kind of brunchy vibe to the bagel and earned it a spot in
the Clean Plate Club, which is great because these pizza bagels and these fries took three days and almost a hundred dollars to make. But even after all that, I found myself craving
a real deal pizza bagel. Mini bagels, sauced and cheesed and broiled with tiny
little cubes of pepperoni. You might've seen on Instagram that I'm thinking about
starting a bagel truck next year
On the left, real crispy wedge fries with ketchup injected in them.
On the right, homemade bagels made into pizza bagels, but underneath the pizza sauce is cream cheese.
Amazing. Now (whispering) gimme the bits...
cooking syringes are the best. probably on of my most used " unnecessary " kitchen gadgets