Bagels from Scratch

Recipe Hits and Misses

Recipe Hits: They taste like actual bagels and after all my hard work I was relieved! The simple way they give to know if the dough is done and prepared to be boiled/cooked/baked worked the second time and the first time it gave me the insight to chuck my batch and make another batch of dough. The resulting bagels are not quite “Bagel Shop Approved”, but pretty close! Chewy (even though I did not use bread flour), tasty and dense in the way the perfect bagels should be, these bagels were so good I did my own drive-by bagelling and left some in my parents’ mailbox today!

Recipe Misses: Well, there’s the usage, in the recipe, of baking terms I think only professional bakers use, and my own personal miss of the first batch, where I added the baking powder to the dough instead of holding off and adding it to the boiling water. I “need” to be better at well kneading, but I think as a novice, I gave my bagels a fighting chance.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons barley malt syrup, (available in health food stores and some well-stocked supermarkets; an equal volume of molasses is a passable substitute, but won’t impart the traditional malty flavor)*** I used honey because I could not find barley malt syrup

• 1 (¼-ounce) packet active dry yeast (about 2¼ teaspoons)

• 6½ cups/885 grams bread flour (or use 6 cups bread flour and ½ cup whole-wheat flour), plus more for kneading

Tip: For the crustiest, chewiest bagels, use bread flour. However, you can still achieve good results with all-purpose flour. Just try to use a brand with a relatively high protein content. Swapping in ½ cup of whole-wheat flour for ½ cup of the bread flour will make the bagels slightly less chewy but will also give them a boost of flavor.

• 2 tablespoons/17 grams Diamond Crystal kosher salt or 1 tablespoon/17 grams Morton kosher salt

Tip: When measured by volume, Morton salt packs more densely than Diamond, making it about twice as salty. For consistent measurements across brands, either weigh it with a scale, or use half the volume of Morton.

• Neutral oil, for greasing the baking sheets

FOR ASSEMBLY:

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• ¼ cup/60 milliliters barley malt syrup, plus more as needed

• 2 ounces/30 grams each sesame seeds, poppy seeds, caraway seeds, dried minced garlic, dried minced onion and/or flaky salt (optional)

Plan of Attack

Foam your yeast. Place 0.5 cup of water in a bowl and add 2 tbls of barley malt syrup (or honey, molasses etc) and your yeast packet. Let the foam rise to the top of the bowl (5-11 minutes).

Mix the flour and salt in your massive mixing bowl. Folks, let’s face it- 6 cups of flour is no sm amount of flour so give yourself some room to mix without spilling flour all over your kitchen. Make your own well in the flour with your fingers, and put the yeast into the middle. Mix throughly.

Add the rest of the lukewarm water and mix until what the NY Times people call “Shaggy”. I think it’s a baking term and not a typo. so mix until it’s as “shaggy” and RESEMBLES what’s in the photo. Mix with your hands until it all sticks together and knead for 15-22 minutes so there are no crunchy spots or spaces where the flour is not mixed in.

After kneading, place into your mixing bowl and cover with a damp towel. Let it rise for 90-130 minutes

After it has risen, Cut into a dozen or so pieces ( i made a baker’s dozen because 13 is such a lucky) of dough using whatever you have on hand. If you’re like me you don’t have what the NY Times thinks home bakers have, so I used a knife. Take the corners of the dough, bring to the center making them into teardrop shaped balls. Cover the ball with your fingers so it has a domed shape and Roll around to make a toadstool Shaped ball. Place oN s greased parchment paper or in my case, tin foil. Parchment paper is ‘Spensive ‘y’all and well, I did not have some when I made them. Cover all the balls with a damp cloth and let them rise for 5-6 minutes.

Do you remember the dUnkin donuts commercial where tge man woke up and said “time to make the donuts”… in not such an excited way? Well, i found mysElf saying “time to make tge bagels” in a way more excit ng way! I did the easy thing, stuck my fingers through the center and made bagel shapes. True bakers apparently make the balls into snakes of dough, and then loop them around their hands, twisting the edges together. I did not do the best job kneading them, arguably maybe not even a good job, so this was hard for me.. So, fingers in the middle it was. Place all the bagels on a sheet pan and let them rise for about 3 hours and 50 minutes to 5 hours minimum, or overnight.

Preheat the oven to 390 degrees. Take a bucket of water and drop a bagel into the bucket to see if it will rise to the top and If it does, they are ready to boil then bake!

Fill a dutch oven (you see mine is not so big) with water, the baking soda and 2 tBls of sweetening syrup (molasses, honey or etc)

When it boils, add the bagels, 2-3 at a time and cook for 60-90 seconds. remove them and put them on a cooling rack.

When all the bagels have boiled, take the still wet bagels and cover them in your desired spices/flavorings. Mine were onion and poppy seed. Place the bagels, in batches, in the oven and cook for 13-15 minutes. The NY Times recipe said to cook them for twice the amount of time but I checked mid cook and they were DONE! I wanted them to be done so much I wished them into being cooked…. if only it worked like this!

Remove them, eat them hot and take a photo of them when you’re not wearing socks. The photo and the not wearing socks part is optional.

Bagels have a special place in my heart. My childhood is filled with memories of going my Grammy’s and standing in line after mass in the Bagel store in Syosset, NY, to buy the bags of bagels for brunch. People say your childhood has many scents and this is true. My childhood was scented with aroma of green grass, the exhaust of commuter trains, the whiff of Old Spice, vanilla in a saucepan filling my Mamma’s kitchen with sweet comfort and it was also filled with the aromas of this legendary bagel store.

When I went to school in Philadelphia I encountered people who had not ever, GASP, encountered a New York bagel, who cheerfully made their way through the bagels in my school’s cafeteria without wincing about how “unbagelly” they are. To me it was sacrilegious. I sadly tried to explain to people who would listen these monstrosities were simply “rolls with holes.” The people who heard me say this apparently were miffed, but I meant it as no mean thing. I simply was stating, bagels should taste like bagels, and to my relief, with this recipe, mine did! I love Philly and I am sure there’s a bunch of things they cook better than New Yorkers, like tasty cakes and cheese steaks…but bagels, well the prize goes the bagel shop of my childhood.

I tried to make them perfectly, but the reality is, this recipe is so complicated, it’s a miracle I made things resembling bagels at all. It gave me more appreciation for the things we take for granted, because people do them every day without making a big fuss over them. After I finished this I felt like something should happen like trumpets would sound or applause should ring out from all the houses in my neighborhood, cheering my accomplishments but it was me and my bagels, silently cheering ourselves on. It was another lesson that sometimes things are worth doing, just for worth of doing them. The bagel bakers of the world go to work every day with no applause, I turn on my lights every night and I don’t often spend deep moments thinking about how many people work to ensure to make sure I have electricity, and when it snows, the only time I often think about people who plow my street is when it’s not ploughed when I want it to be. The world runs because people who do thankless jobs, like baking bagels, and this recipe reminded me to think of this group of people some more