Category: Bagels

In Which Our Novice Baker Finally Achieves The Bagel Of His Dreams

For the last three months or so I’ve been trying to make bagels that taste good, replicate the texture and chew of those of my long-lost youth, and look pretty much like a bagel should. Go back a few posts and you’ll see one that looks like it came from the croissant factory. Not good.

But now, I think I’ve got it:

Today’s batch, onion on top, plain on the bottom. I’m happy with them, and I’ll be very satisfied if I can do as well from now on.

These are sourdough bagels, no yeast at all. They have just a little bit of tang that balances the malt in the recipe, and best of all, they are as chewy as the bagels I teethed on as an infant during the first Eisenhower administration. Really chewy.

In fact, it’s said that when teething I gnawed on a single bagel for a month, which would say as much about parenting in the ’50s as it does about the bagels, but my family is known to exaggerate.

These bagels came not from the excellent yeast recipe at Sally’s Baking Addiction I used earlier, but from baked-theblog.com, and you can find it here: https://www.baked-theblog.com/new-york-style-sourdough-bagels-with-roasted-garlic-labneh/. If you’re not a sourdough person by all means use Sally’s recipe.

Because I can’t stand not tinkering with stuff, I do have a couple of tweaks to the baked-theblog recipe:

  • The only tricky part with your sourdough starter is making sure it’s quite active when you’re ready to use it. For me, that would be four to six hours after feeding it. But it can work well if you feed it the day before, let it sit out until it perks up, then refrigerate it until the next day. At worst, you’ll have to let the shaped bagels proof for a longer time, up to four hours after shaping them.
  • The recipe also calls for all-purpose flour. I think the bagels are better with bread flour, which is higher in protein but these days may not be so easy to come by. I used Heckers all-purpose flour, which is 11.5 percent protein, and replaced 40 grams of flour with 40 grams of vital wheat gluten, which is available online and in some groceries. This brought the protein content up to nearly 15 percent, and made the bagels teething-worthy.
  • Finally, the recipe equates 750 grams of flour to five cups. A cup of flour weighs 120-125 grams, so if you use cup measure instead of weight, by the spoon-and-sweep method you’ll probably get closer to six cups before you hit 750 grams. I say that when it comes to flour, it’s best to have a kitchen scale and measure by weight.

Still, I think that even if you use the recipe exactly as written you’ll come out with very satisfying bagels. Do remember that it’s a two-day process but I found that it works on whatever schedule I have.

This recipe makes the heaviest, stiffest dough I’ve ever seen. Your stand mixer will struggle, and might give up entirely. Kneading by hand will make today’s trip to the gym unnecessary.

In the end, there are a few steps but not all that much effort. And even though one can buy a pretty good bagel where we live, I can now say that mine taste better and look just about as good.

They are, at last, the bagels of my dreams.

Let The Bagel Be Unbroken

Like everyone else I know I’m sitting at home, except for masked-and-gloved expeditions to the supermarket every couple of weeks. From the looks of things, everyone in the world has decided to take up baking when they are not washing their hands or going to the bathroom. Our markets have vast empty spaces where flour, paper towels and toilet paper used to sit.

I’ve been thinking if a guy wants to see immediate and sincere gratitude, the hot birthday present this spring could be a jumbo pack of toilet paper. But that’s neither here nor there.

I’m a meat guy and baking, like vegetables, has been off my beat. But we wanted bagels a couple of weeks ago, to replicate the deli experience we can’t have right now. I had some flour and yeast so I gave it a try. The bagels were OK, but far from ideal.

I wanted ideal.

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My first attempt. Using the finger-poke method to shape them, the tops turned out OK but the bottoms were wrinkled as a Shar-Pei’s face, and a lot less cute.

On my third effort I hit on a really good recipe at Sally’s Baking Addiction, here: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/homemade-bagels/. I used her instruction for overnight proofing in the refrigerator, and they were delicious.

This is a great recipe and easy. I boiled the bagels for 90 seconds on each side, gave them their egg-white wash before baking and they came out perfectly chewy, with a slightly crisp crust. They taste just a little sweet like a perfect plain bagel should, and I think they taste better than any I can buy.

Shaping them, however, is killing me.

Bagel shapers seem be either pokers or snakers. Pokers make a ball out of each piece of dough then send a floured index finger through the middle and wiggle it until they have what they want. Snakers make a 10-inch-long rope of the dough, then fold it around their open hand and roll to seal.

My tops look fine when I poke the hole, but as I cannot get a perfectly shaped ball in the first place the bottom bakes up looking like a construction zone.

Snaking gives me good-looking circles before I boil them but once in the water they decide to turn into bagel croissants.

A croissant bagel is not what I'm after.

This is not what I want.

On this specimen from a couple of weeks ago, the ends came apart when I boiled it, and once the bagel is in the water there’s no going back. It tasted good, but I needed to do better.

Today I tried the method you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTdbDxfYydo.

The technique in this video has you tie a little knot at the end of your rope, then press to roll everything together. I can see that I didn’t go quite far enough with my knot, and maybe not vigorous enough with my roll to seal, so I had a little unwinding in the water.

Bagel snakes. Looks like the two in the back are attacking each other. Gotta tighten my knot.

Still, I am encouraged and having fun. The bagels taste great and I think I’m closing in on the shaping. I think I’ll have it right next time.

As it is, I’ve learned something fun, useful and delicious.

And that absolute perfection might be overrated.