Bagel 1.0 (beta)
Last week was so crazy that I just needed to take a break and make some tasty baked treats, so I tried my hand at making bagels over the weekend. It was quite an interesting process, since bagels are different from “normal” bread in two ways. First, bagel dough is much denser than regular bread dough. This makes kneading it much more physically demanding, but if you keep at it then you can produce a very nice malleable dough.
Second, bagels are actually poached in boiling water before they are baked! This is what gives that characteristic “bagel” feel to the bread. You only poach them for about a minute before you get them ready for the oven, so it’s not too crazy.
Anyway, here is a picture of the results (click for a close-up):
My biggest complaint about how they turned out is that they are way too dense. This is because the recipe I used only has you let the dough rise once, before forming it into individual bagels, and I wasn’t smart enough to realize that this would be a problem. Really, you need to let the bagels rise once more, to get that nice fluffy soft result that most people enjoy at the bagel shop.
So, I will probably try this again next weekend, because it was just so fun! My ultimate goal - blueberry bagels. One of my favorite bagels of all time is the blueberry bagel from Goldstein’s Bagel Bakery. It’s a consistent winner, but I just don’t get over there too often anymore. So, if I can only crack the bagel secret then I’ll be able to enjoy them anytime I want.