Bagels

I made bagels today. Not really because I was craving bagels, but because a friend had found a recipe and wasn't sure what had gone wrong with it. (A couple things, really. It wasn't the best written in terms of instructions.)

So I made bagels to see what happened. Firstly: the recipe was way short on flour. Imagine trying to knead your average homemade cake batter. Yeah. I only had about 4.5 cups of white flour, so I ended up making whole wheat bagels out of necessity.

Start with:

3.5 cups of flour
1 tablespoon of salt
1.5 teaspoons of yeast

Mix that up and add (together):

2.25 cups of warm water
2 tablespoons of sugar
1 tablespoon of oil

(This is where the recipe first went wrong. You end up with... well, slightly firmer than cake batter, and it says, knead!)

So now, add another two cups of flour. If that doesn't get it to a kneadable consistency, add more in quarter or half cup increments until it's workable. You'll end up adding more flour as you knead, of course. Knead for 5-10 minutes (I did about 7).

I have a cold kitchen (okay, well, most of the apartment is in the upper 60s), so I generally set the oven to warm (170 F) and then turn it off and have anything I need to rise in there. Let the dough rise to about double (about an hour) in an oiled bowl. (My mom always flipped the dough ball after setting it in the bowl to put the oiled side up; it helps keep it from drying out.)

Once the dough's risen, you're going to form balls off it to make your bagel shapes. I did about 2.5"-3" balls, except for the 3 bigger bagels I made mostly because I wasn't paying attention to how much dough I'd taken. Put your thumbs through the middle to make a hole and stretch it out. (I'm not coming up with a coherent description of making bagel loops, but it's sort of like turning a steering wheel without using the hand over hand method my mother was always admonishing me to use, which I never did. You just want to squeeze the dough to shape it as you turn.)

Put the bagels on pans (greased or with wax paper) to rise again for about 20 minutes. While they're rising, you can prepare the boiling water. I filled a 6-quart pot about half full. Add 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1 tablespoon of baking soda and bring to a boil. If it boils before the bagels are done rising again, just turn it down so you don't boil off your water too early.

Once you get to the point you're ready to boil the bagels, you can preheat your oven to 400 F. (This is the second place the recipe had problems; the temperature was in Celsius, but unlabeled.)

Depending how big your bagels are, you can boil 2 to 3 at a time. Just drop them in, boil on one side for 1 to 2 minutes, and then drain. I found it easiest to get them back out of the water with a broad spatula, then set them on a plate with a paper towel on it while I put the next two in before transferring them to a greased cookie sheet. I had to change the paper towel after each set.

Before you put the bagels in the oven, brush them with egg and add whatever toppings you want. I did one sheet of garlic but left the other two plain.

I fit about 5 bagels apiece on my medium cookie sheets (4 average and 1 big bagel). I put the two medium sheets in together for 15 minutes, which was probably a touch to long, so 14ish minutes is probably fine depending how big your bagels are.

I got 15 bagels out of this. If I had watched more closely on my sizing I probably could have done about 18. They're okay, but I'm not a huge fan of whole wheat bagels, so next time I'll make sure I have more flour first.