With abandon

Writing term papers is not a pretty affair--at least in my case. The dishes pile up. I don't bother with my hair. I grimace a lot. So, I'll have to be brief today.

A few weeks ago, I finally kneaded together a batch of Milk Bar "mother" dough and baked up a few bagel bombs to share with the other sleepy-eyed folks in my early-morning political philosophy seminar. The bagel bomb is Christina Tosi's nod to the New York bagel, sesame seeds, dried onions, garlic powder, and all. Bite into one and you'll get the "bomb" bit--think bacon-scallion cream-cheese explosion. I think they went over pretty well with the class. I might have seen a person or two reaching for a second, maybe even a third bomb...but I won't mention any names.

Munching on bagel bombs definitely helped the morning along, but, really, I still think that I got the best of it while making them earlier that week. That bacon-scallion cream cheese? Totally amazing and dead easy to make too. I'll admit to having had a taste or two and maybe to licking the stand-mixer paddle clean. Hey--I get to when I'm doing the baking, right?

But in all seriousness, I have to say that after its spell in the oven, the cream cheese tucked into each bomb isn't nearly as good. The scallions lose their pluck. The cream cheese gets a little curdled. Next time around, I think I might just try my hand at some proper bagels and paddle together this cream cheese to mound on top. If you ate sour-cream-and-onion chips with abandon as a kid like I did, this is your cream cheese.

Bacon-scallion Cream Cheese
Adapted from the Momofuku Milk Bar Cookbook

50 g / 1 3/4 oz bacon, the smokier the better
200 g / 7 oz cream cheese
2 g scallion greens, thinly sliced (about 2-3 scallions' worth)
5 g / 1 teaspoon sugar
2 g / 1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

Cook the bacon in a skillet over medium heat until it's auburn brown and crunchy. Remove it from the pan and chop it into small pieces; reserve it and, separately, the rendered bacon fat.
Put the cream cheese in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and cream it on medium speed. Pour in the reserved bacon fat and paddle to combine. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the chopped bacon, scallions, sugar, and salt and paddle briefly to incorporate.

One last thing: to help out those of you who already have the relevant cookbook and who might want to tackle a project I've posted about, I'm going to be adding a few technical notes to the end of my project posts from now on. I hope some of you out there will find them helpful!

Technical Notes for Milk Bar's Bagel Bombs

• Oven temperature: the recipe directs you to bake these at 325 degrees F, but even when I baked the bombs at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, I wasn't getting any colour on them. I tweeted Tosi about it (it's a thing she does every Friday), and she suggested that I give them a minute or two on low under the broiler. It did the trick.
• Yeast: the "Ingredients" section at the beginning of the Milk Bar cookbook says to use active-dry yeast, but I'm pretty confident that you should be using instant yeast for the mother dough. First of all, the active-dry stuff won't break down unless you dissolve it in liquid. Second, the quantity of yeast and the time allotted for proofing are more appropriate for instant.
• Dough: the mother dough is probably a little wetter than the average bread dough--just keep your hands floured.