Bagels!

I made bagels tonight! E and I tried to make some a year or so ago, and they did not work out well. We haven't tried since. But tonight, I wanted a bagel. There are no bagel places in town now that the recession took out the local family-owned bagel shop, and store-bought bagels are an entirely different food. So I found this recipe and decided to give it a go. Here's how it went.

4 cups bread flour

1 Tbls sugar

1 1/2 tsps salt

1 Tbls vegetable oil

2 tsps instant yeast

1-1/4- 1-1/2 cups of warm water

We put all the ingredients into the bowl of my stand mixer, attached the dough hook, and mixed it on "stir" speed. I added the extra 1/4 cup of water and pushed the speed up one level. The mixer is a pretty good one, but it wasn't liking the stiffness of the dough, so I kneaded it in there for about five minutes and then took it out and kneaded it by hand for another three or four. It got to the smooth point, and I cut it into eight equal sized balls. The plan was to let it rest for 15 minutes, but one thing led to another and I didn't get back to it for about an hour and a half. It had a slight crust over it, which may have happened even without the extra time, so I'm going to try putting a towel over it next time. Anyway, we followed the rest of the instructions:

Pre heat your oven to 425.

Now, take each of the dough balls and using two hands, roll it into a little snake on the counter. When the snake is longer than the width of your two hands, wrap it around your dominant roiling hand. The dough rope should be wrapped so the overlapping ends are together at your palm, near the start of your fingers. Now take the two overlapping ends, and use your palm to squish/roll these two ends together.

Let your bagels rest on the counter for about 20 minutes, and meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil, and grease a large baking tray lightly. You can just rub a splash of vegetable oil and rub it around.

After the 20 minute wait, your bagels will start to look puffy, and it's time to get them boiling! Add them as many at a time as you can to your boiling water without crowding them. Boil for about a minute, turn them over, and boil for another minute. Take them out a let dry for a minute and then place them on your oiled baking tray. Repeat until all the bagels are boiled.

Add the tray to the oven, and after 10 minutes, flip the bagels over, bake for another ten minutes; and they're done!

Let them cool for at least 20 minutes.

You can add any toppings you like to these. To make sesame, onions, poppy seed, caraway etc. etc. bagels just have a dry plate ready with the seed or spice topping spread out on it. After the bagels have come out of the boiling water, place them face down onto the seeds, and then place the seed side up onto the baking tray. Bake and flip as for plain bagels. 

I timed the boiling for precisely one minute on each side because that seems to be where we went wrong last time. We made four plain, two with dried onion and garlic, and two with cinnamon-sugar. The toppings didn't go so well. They all burned, and turning them over at the halfway point didn't work. Our oven rack was also too close to the bottom, so most burned a little. There was a round cake pan left in the oven from another recipe that requires a water-filled pan to be underneath the bread, and we just never got around to taking it out. The bagels that cooked over that pan didn't burn on the bottoms.

Anyway, they're amazing. And if I don't go ahead with the other six businesses I really want to start, I'm totally going to start the Fort Snuggle Bagel Bakery. (Fort Snuggle is what we call our house. The Fort Snuggle Auxiliary Extension is what we call our chicken coop.) Come to think of it, we're going to a garage sale tomorrow that a bunch of friends are having... I should whip up another batch...