Will it press - Bacon and Eggs

As I knew I would be making bagels, I offered to make breakfast bagels for the early starters on the support team. Except my early morning bagel baking, combined with a cancelled train meant I couldn't make it in before they left for breakfast on Monday, and I don't have their phone numbers, so I couldn't tell them I was running late. So breakfast bagel day was delayed to today. This is the one that they usually buy in the mornings:

Of course, I couldn't turn down an opportunity for another "Will it press?" experiment, but after talking it over at dinner with the family, there were some constraints that I had to place:

•  No bacon or egg could touch the grill itself, nor any bacon fat. Some people at the office aren't able to eat bacon for religious reasons, and one person in the office is vegan, so I didn't want to cross contaminate the grill.
• No strong bacon smell should linger in the kitchen. Though all the early starters said they love the smell of bacon, I don't think everyone in the office agrees.

What I ended up using:

• butter (because Roger said he loves bacon cooked with butter)
• one egg per bagel
• two strips of bacon per bagel
• aluminium foil (it says it's "heavy duty", but all of them said that, so I don't know if it's really any different to regular aluminium foil from the supermarket, but I wanted to prevent tears)
• egg flipper

To cook the bacon, I had the idea of wrapping it in foil. After the dismal attempt at cooking pancakes using baking paper, I thought foil would be better at transferring heat. I've used foil to line public BBQs before, and found that oil still tends to leak through where the two pieces of foil overlap. So I decided to double wrap it. Once to completely encase the pieces of bacon, and then seam-side down, encased in another foil wrap, so even if the oil leaked out of the first wrapper, it would get caught in the second.

I simply sandwiched it in the press, and left it for a minute. 

After a minute, I lifted the press to take a look, and the package ballooned like this:

I figured it was steam, so I unwrapped the foil a little and let the steam out. The bacon wasn't really cooked at this point, so I put it on for another couple of minutes.

It ended up being the soft-cooked bacon, which Other Anthony said is how he prefers it. I forgot to take a photo of it, unfortunately, but here it is on top of one of the bagels:

 The egg was the trickier part. Both Other Anthony and Roger said they preferred eggs sunny-side up, which meant that I couldn't really press the egg. My first attempt was to see if the press was hot enough to cook the egg. I melted a bit of butter to grease the foil, and cracked the egg. It took a while, but eventually, the egg did cook, but it didn't have the proper browned look of a regular fried egg.

It was really easy to make a sunny-side up egg though, as the yolk didn't really cook at all (was just a bit cooked on the bottom). The only problem I had was that the egg stuck to the foil. I added extra butter for the second and third attempts, which made the egg a bit easier to remove, but I didn't want to drown the egg in butter, so I didn't add too much.

 Lastly, I halved and toasted the bagels (which was pretty tough, as the bagels were already so thin!), put it together, and served. :)

I accidentally left Darren's bacon in the grill too long, so it ended up being the crispy kind, but luckily, he said he prefers it that way.

Other Anthony, Roger and Darren were all really happy to get breakfast in the morning, and Anthony and Peter caught me in the kitchen making the bagels and were jealous they didn't get any. Although, Anthony did offer to buy me a breakfast bagel tomorrow morning, but I have my regular breakfast, so I turned him down.

So yes, you can press bacon and eggs (if you call what I did with the eggs "pressing" it).

Bagel Bake-Off!!!

After 3 false-starts, we finally had it, although this one was looking like a false-start, too, as MrBrioche wasn't able to bake over the weekend because he had to look after his kids. I'm pretty sure Catherine forgot entirely, as I heard she was out all weekend - though she didn't even say anything this morning, which is unusual, as she usually apologises for forgetting. Michael sent an email last night saying he might not make it as his daughter is sick, but he came to work in the end, so it was me against him, a rematch of the croissant bake-off.

I used the recipe from the book redbeanpork gave me: Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice. You can find the recipe here: https://smittenkitchen.com/2007/09/bronx-worthy-bagels/. He really wasn't kidding that it makes 12 large bagels!

Unlike my first attempt, which resulted in:

This recipe requires less proofing on the day of cooking, which is what I wanted, because as my new cooking hero says:

A good bagel need not be hot, but it should be fresh. As we've found in the past, a bagel's at its best within 30 minutes of baking. After this point, the crackly crust loses its crispness and the innards start to get tough rather than tender. For this reason, it's virtually impossible to get a good bagel anywhere other than at the location at which it's baked.

As I'm already getting up at the ass-crack of dawn anyway, I might as well put the early-rise to good use.

So the day before, I prepared my dough.

This recipe uses the sponge technique, which I kinda screwed up by forgetting to whisk the yeast and flour together before adding the water, but it was somewhat OK afterwards.

The kneading took a lot longer than the recipe said, and I found my dough was quite dry, but I think part of that is because I wasn't using a stand mixer, and it was hard to knead that much dough on the pastry mat as it kept shifting. But it balled up fine, and was easy to stretch out (I made sure to make the holes much bigger this time - I learned from my first failed attempt).

I didn't get to do the float test, as we had to leave for my parents' house, but they came out of the fridge in the morning looking great!

Into the water to boil (similar to my first attempt, I added some malted syrup to the water, to add extra flavour to the crust).

Then disaster! After boiling the bagels came out really flat. :(

I didn't take any pictures, as I had to bake them and get to work, but here they are in the oven:

And on the tray:

The taste and texture was fine, but they were like little frisbees, not bagels. :( I think my first attempt was much better!

Here are the contenders - can you guess which one is mine?

Michael made his the night before, so they were a bit stale, but other than being a bit dry, they were better than mine.

Unfortunately, I got crushed, with the score:

Michael - 11
Tied - 3
Me - 2

With one person even awarding Michael 10s in all the categories, and 1s for me.

I've done a bit of research into why mine were flat. Possible culprits: water wasn't hot enough (highly likely, as you can see from the photo), overproofed, also likely, as I was busy finishing my Beef Stroganoff as well in the morning). Will have to try again another time.

Michael said we are now even, so we need a final bake-off and the challenge is tarte aux pommes, date: 3rd October.

Money and Food

Michael told me that in France, there are some restaurants where a woman who is eating with a man will be given a menu with no prices listed on it, while he gets the "real" menu, the idea being that the man is paying, so she doesn't need to worry. Gender implications aside, I thought it was a fascinating concept. If you are eating at a restaurant, you should ideally be ordering what sounds interesting to you, with no regard for the price. Sure, there have been a whole heap of studies that show that price can influence your perception of the meal, but assuming most meals in a single restaurant will be within a certain range, would not knowing how much it costs affect your order?

Despite how much I love food, I wouldn't say I'm a fine diner. My idea of a fancy meal is anywhere that isn't take-away food. The most expensive meal I've ever had was about 300 Euros at the Eiffel Tower, and while it was an amazing meal, and the service was incredible, I'm sure part of the cost of it was the atmosphere of being inside the tower itself. In general, eating out for me is usually sub-$20 meals.

Dan Ariely (it has been a while since I've mentioned him) talks about the pain of paying (video, no transcript on the site) - which is where your enjoyment of an event is dampened when you go to pay for it. Something which doesn't occur when someone else is paying, or you've pre-paid on an earlier day (at which point, you experienced the pain in the past, when you paid, and can continue to enjoy the event). He suggests the best thing to do would be to find someone else to eat with, and alternate who pays.

I have an arrangement with someone at work where we'll go out for lunch and alternate who pays. To be honest, lunch with him doesn't seem any different from lunch with anyone else where I have to pay, but maybe part of it is that we always go to the same restaurant (Nando's), and we always order the same thing (1/4 chicken extra hot for me, and chicken BLT lemon and herb for him), so we both know how much it costs. Also, while Nando's is on the higher end price-wise of "fast-food", it's still cheap for a sit-down meal, and maybe the effect doesn't present itself when you're spending about $30 for two people (the actual amount would probably vary depending on a person's income and expenses).

I've been thinking about whether it's possible to have a restaurant where patrons are unaware of the price - at least until they have to pay. My first thought was to have a dynamic menu. Upon being seated, guests will input the maximum amount of money that they would like to spend on the meal. The menu will only display the items that fall within their budget, but will not display the price. While this would mean that your choice of meal would not be influenced by the price, the fact that you are being asked to pre-consider how much you are willing to spend may have that same dampening effect on the meal - especially if you start to wonder whether that salad that's basically lettuce with some dressing is costing you $50. Also, it wouldn't really work in practice, because some people might want an entree or drinks, but not if doing so would mean they can no longer afford any mains. Or even tapas-style meals, where you don't know how many dishes someone might want to order. Another issue is that it would really only work once per meal. Unless you are going to randomly assign a price to each dish, someone will remember what they paid last time, or there would inevitably be a price list collated on Trip Advisor or something. Security through obscurity should not be relied upon!

There was a restaurant that I never went to where people could pay what they though the meal was worth (I only found out about it because one of the customers at the supermarket where I worked told me about it). It sounded like a good idea in theory, but in practice, it probably wouldn't achieve the goal I am after. Firstly, there are bound to be people who would exploit it - "I thought that meal was rubbish, here's $1". Secondly, the restaurant may struggle to recoup the cost, especially as it may be tough for a guest to correctly estimate the cost of preparing the meal - you have the ingredients, then the cost of the cook, the cost of the waiter, the cost of management, the furniture, rent for the restaurant, cleaning supplies, I'm sure there are many other things that are built into the cost of a meal. If someone were to just estimate based on how much the ingredients cost, they'd probably grossly underestimate the overall cost. If you set a lower bound (e.g. you must pay at least $12), then you are re-introducing the cost factor into it, and might as well just have a regular menu. From what I have heard, the restaurant is no longer operating (actually, I'm wrong, they still exist: Lentil as Anything, however, they are a not-for-profit organisation who happens to have pay-as-you-feel restaurants, so their costs are likely offset by donations. I think it's a pretty cool idea though.).

Another thing I've seen in restaurants is to have a set meal price, e.g. $30 for a 2-course meal, $45 for a 3-course meal. While it may seem like this would remove cost as a deciding factor in choosing which entree/main/dessert you'd like, I still think it can have a lingering effect. If you are super stingy, you may decide to order the dish you think is worth the most, rather than what you'd like to eat the most, so that you'll make the most of the money you're paying, e.g. ordering the most expensive sounding entree and main, because if you're going to be paying $30, you might as well get the most value out of it. Though I don't know how many people would actually do that, and whether those people are the kind of people who would care about getting the maximum enjoyment out of a meal.

As a side-note, someone else at work got me thinking about the cost of food and enjoyment. His previous company sent him to Japan to work for a bit. There was a stall near his office that sold bento boxes during lunch. They were about 500 yen each (about $6), and he thought they were amazing. Every now and again, there would be a catered work function, and he'd order a 16000 yen steak (about $200). He said the bento box gave him 95% satisfaction, and the steak 97% satisfaction. He couldn't reconcile the thought that the extra 2% satisfaction cost $194. It just didn't seem worth it to him.

I can really relate to that feeling. My mum didn't really like eating out (possibly because it was out of our budget), so I never really got to experience eating out growing up. Going to uni was the first time I really started eating at restaurants, and that was usually uni student budget places. Some of my favourite meals were had during this time, and I think a lot of the meals I've had since have been unfairly compared to those. As I work in the CBD now, food is going to be more expensive in general, because the market is much more different. Rent is going to be higher, and the salary of people in the area is also going to be higher (on average). I'm starting to sound like an old-timer now, but I remember the massive $2 samosas that I could get at uni, which were delicious. A samosa near my office will probably set you back about $4. A side-side-note: there's an Indian guy on my floor who says he knows where to get the best samosas in the state - they just happen to be about 30 minutes away from the office, but he knows the guy who makes them, so we were able to get them for $1.80 each. As part of a recent social event, we ordered about $70 worth of samosas and had someone from Uber drive them in and shared them with the floor. To his credit, they were amazing samosas.

Anyway, back to the restaurant idea. I thought maybe you could have a credit system, where a patron would put in $X beforehand (roughly enough to cover multiple meals at least), and once their balance dropped too low, they would be notified that it needed to be topped up (or it could be an auto-top up). They could scan their card before the meal, order whatever they wanted and the amount would be deducted from their credit. That way, they would not have to think about the cost (as they know they have enough money to cover it), and are free to order anything on the menu. I think this solution would solve both problems (removing cost as a factor of ordering, and the pain of paying), however, there are a few implementation issues. Firstly, you'd have to convince patrons to trust you enough to be depositing a sizeable chunk of money into your system. It works for LAN cafes, because the cost itself is fairly low (e.g. $2 per hour), so even if you were to pre-pay for a decent amount of time, you'd really only be risking a small amount of money. With meals, if you consider a main is about $20, entree about $10 and drinks about $10-15, that's $45 per meal, and to pre-pay for multiple meals, I'd say you're asking someone to deposit around $200 into your system (if you consider that most customers would be paying for 2 meals at a time). Until you manage to build a reputation for yourself, I don't see anyone willing to drop that kind of money. I guess if each diner were to have their own card (with the option of using yours to pay for someone else's meal assuming the balance is high enough), the cost of entry would be lower.

The other issue is one of transparency. Your guests would simply have to trust that you are subtracting the right amount from their account after each meal, and that you are only topping up when required. In order for you to keep your prices a secret, you wouldn't be able to tell them how much you're subtracting from their account (otherwise, over the course of many meals, they would be able to deduce the cost of each dish). I also think that it might be illegal to do that, but I wouldn't even know where to begin to look up something like that.

Maybe if you were to open such a restaurant, you could raise the quality and the prices, and market it to wealthy people, who can afford not to know how much they're spending on a meal. You would have to make it clear that you couldn't issue tax invoices (or maybe you can issue a tax invoice for the amounts deposited into the account?). Dining at this restaurant could be seen as a status symbol - look at how rich I am, I can afford to eat at a restaurant that doesn't tell you much much money it charges its customers! While I do enjoy tasty food, and I do aspire to be a great cook someday, I've never been a big fan of class dividing behaviour like this. The entire system makes it unavailable to people who are interested in only dining at this restaurant on very infrequent occasions.

I can't really think of a good way that this could be accomplished, so I thought about trying it on a smaller scale first. Michael lamented that he has never had the experience of having someone pay for his meal, as he was raised to believe that the man should pay. I felt like he was looking pointedly at me.

Another side-note: I found that pretty insulting, actually. Granted, he is from another country with different customs, but the assumption that I have had free meals throughout my life is incorrect. Almost every date-like meal I have been on has been split, with a few exceptions, primarily Charmeleon, because his income so greatly outstrips mine, so it seemed fair (but I did a lot of baking in exchange, so I think we were even-ish in the end).

I had a plan to find a restaurant near our office which doesn't have the prices displayed on a board, print out a menu without the prices, and take him out to lunch. MrFodder said he's probably just trying to scam a free lunch out of me, but I'm not too sure about that, as the first time we've had lunch together, he paid while I was grabbing my coat, without even asking if we were going to split it. I did pay him my half of it in cash though!

There's also Intern Daniel, who I often go back and forth between who owes who lunch, as we do favours for each other at work. I would actually like to test it out with him though, as I think we both have the same background, and similar ways of thinking. We both love cheap, disgustingly greasy foods. However, for the sake of this experiment, we'd have to go a bit more high-class, as I don't think you'd get the effect when it's a $5 meal from the cheap-ass Asian food court that we both frequent (where we once managed to get about 20 fried chicken wings for $6.50 due to Intern Daniel's amazing ability to stack food on a plate - "all you can fit on a plate" places must fear him).

It is surprisingly difficult to find a restaurant that doesn't display its menu on a board around our office. I guess most office workers would prefer to be able to take a meal back to the office and continue working at their desk (at least that's what I've noticed about a lot of the people that I work with). The other thing I was thinking of was putting a blindfold on Intern Daniel (at least while walking into a restaurant). There are a few restaurants that have the menu on a board at the front, but not inside. I think he'd be willing to let me lead him around the CBD for a bit while blindfolded.

If I do manage to get some takers for my experiment, I will report back!