Bagel’s All Mighty

I had this sudden urge this morning to try my hand at making bagels. I figured they ought to be a lot like making rolls, except I knew that bagels get boiled.

Anyway, my daughter Samantha really loves blueberry bagels and we seem to go through a lot of them. But I rarely find a coupon for bagels at the grocery store and they don’t go on sale often enough.

So I went looking for a recipe and some instructions because I wanted to make some really good bakery style bagels. I found a useful website here that got me started. It has a recipe and it shows you how to roll the dough to make the bagel shape.

So I followed their recipe:

4 Cups flour – I used 2 c wheat and 2 c white flour

1 T sugar

1 t salt

1T oil

2t yeast

1 1/4 – 1 1/2 c warm water

I mixed it all in a bowl, the dry ingredients first:

Then the water and oil until it all stuck together nicely. I ended up adding about 1T water beyond the 1 1/4c for my first batch.

I also chopped up and drained some defrosted blueberries to add to the dough because I wanted to try making blueberry bagels. I didn’t have a blueberry bagel recipe to go by though so I was just guessing how to do it.

Here it is pre-kneading:

And after kneading for 10 minutes.

The dough was really hard to knead. My wrists hurt, but maybe that was because I am out of practice. I usually let my mixer do that. But I wanted the exercise. It was really stiff so I decided to add a little extra water next time.

I divided this batch in two. One half I left plain and the other half  I kneaded some of the blueberries in. I squeezed out the juice because I worried that it would make the dough sticky. I decided the blueberries were better added during the mixing stage. Eh. You live, you learn. :)

But it made a pretty ball of dough though!

Then I divided the dough into 8 equal pieces and let it rest for 20 minutes.

I liked the blueberry dough better because it was more moist than the plain dough. When it was time to form it into bagels it was easier to work with.

You make the bagel shapes by rolling the balls of dough into snakes a little more than the length of your 2 palms. Then you wrap it around one palm and then squeeze the ends together. You then fuse that seal by rolling it on the table. Moister dough works well this way. Dry dough is difficult. :/

Then let the bagels rise for 20 or so minutes until they’re nice and fluffy, so the earlier website says. Mine didn’t get fluffy. They rose a little bit. Maybe it was my yeast? I would love some ideas on how to make my dough rise nicely.

Notice that the holes are bigger than you would normally see in a bagel. When it rises and fluffs up, that hole gets smaller. You want to start with bigger holes.

Another method I saw later on, for making the bagel shapes is to poke a hole into your ball of dough and then stretch it out making it even all around as you do so. I’m sure this works well too. Might be easier in fact but probably won’t have that pretty twisted dough look that you see on the bakery bagels. Now I know where that comes from. It’s the seal.

While I waited for bagels to rise I started my pan of water boiling and turned on my oven to 425. And I made a couple more batches of dough. One for blueberry and the third for cinnamon-raisin. This dough is the cinnamon-raisin (I tell you, since living in Cinnaminson, I keep having to check how I spell cinnamon! Couldn’t we have been Cinnamonson??)

I put a cup of raisins and 2 t cinnamon and used the whole 1 1/2 c water. I think the wheat flour needed the extra water. By my third batch I figured that out. It probably could have used even a bit more water and been even better. But this dough was pretty nice.

After the bagels rose, I boiled them for about a minute per side. Be careful flipping them over and removing them with tongs. They can fall apart.

They fluffed up a little more when they boiled. But they’re still not as light and fluffy as I’d really like.

I took them out and let them drip off for a little bit and then placed them on a greased cookie sheet.

And then baked them for 15-20 minutes. The website above says to bake for 10 and then flip and bake for another 10.

I tried that but I didn’t like the baked on both sides look so the other batches I didn’t flip.

My first batch:

 

By my third batch, I’d figured out how to get the dough to fuse. My previous ones were too dry. These look much better.

And here is my 3rd batch:

And the best from each batch. You can see the progression as I got better:

I’m not sure about the taste. I think the wheat flour is overpowering the other tastes. You can’t taste the blueberry at all. I wonder if it needed more sugar and maybe I shouldn’t have juiced the berries. I was just worried about the juice turning the dough completely blue. I’ll try a different method next time. Also, I think an olive and olive oil dough would be really good to try. mmm…

If I can just figure out how to get that dough to rise better. Someone mentioned gluten. I’ll give that a try too. Also, I’ll try mixing it in the breadmaker and letting the dough rise in there first and see if that helps make them airier.

I did keep the blueberry juice. I made syrup out of it for Saturday morning’s pancakes. Oh yum!