DIY: Bagels!

Bagels bagels bagels!

When I was growing up in Squirrel Hill, a mostly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Pittsburgh, bagels were pretty much a staple part of my diet. Every week my mom and I would strap my sister in a stroller and go down to Bagel Land Bagels, where my mom would get us a few mini bagels to eat on the way home. Later, when the Brueggers' and Einstein Bros. chains sprang up, there were three bagel shops within two blocks from our apartment, which meant that good, fresh, warm bagels were something I took for granted.

When we moved to Youngstown, we actually used to drive the hour or so back to Pittsburgh just to get decent bagels. I’ve yet to find a supply I can trust in this area.

So making bagels was something I was really looking forward to! I took the recipe from the same book that served up my sun-dried tomato bread, Artisan Bread In Five Minutes A Day.

The dough is easy to mix up: 3 cups of lukewarm mater, 1 and 1/2 tablespoons yeast, 1 and 1/2 tablespoons salt, and 1 and 1/2 tablespoons sugar together. Then I gradually added in 6 and 1/4 cups of bread flour (while, luckily, my mother had given me for free several months ago when she bought a bunch of it in bulk). As with the tomato bread, this project made me very, very grateful for my fabulous Kitchen Aid stand mixer.

I let the dough rise for two hours; it didn’t fluff up the same way my breads do, because the dough was a little thicker and denser. Much like the tomato bread, however, it was a little wetter than I would have liked, so I had to dust it with plenty of flour when I handled and shaped it.

The recipe made twenty bagels, so I divided the dough into twenty little lumps and then shaped them into rings. That’s harder than it sounds when the dough is so soft, though, and a lot of them came out kind of lumpy.

Now, apparently, the way you get bagels to be bagel-like instead of bread-like is to boil them. Boiling water + 1/4 cups of sugar + 1 teaspoon = the secret to bagelness!

I dropped each bagel into the water and let it simmer in there for two minutes, then flipped it and let it cook for a minute more. Then I put them all on a floured towel to absorb the moisture before putting on the special toppings.

I made four kinds: blueberry (strawberry was the original plan, but we discovered that we still had blueberries frozen from month ago in our freezer, and I refuse to buy fruit when I already have usable fruit in my freezer), Italian herb and cheese (parm cheese with some Italian seasoning), garlic and onion, and salt (for which I used Morton’s ice cream rock salt, and crushed it up with Adam’s mortar and pestle.

Then I baked them in the over (on my baking stone!) for twenty minutes at 400 degrees. The smell of bagels wafted everywhere; I’m pretty sure even the people in the apartment section next door knew I was making bagels.

And, like in the tomato bread experiment, I used a cup of water in a broiler pan to add steam to the oven. It really does work— the crust comes out all browned and chewy!

Now, this all sounds really easy, but it was actually a really, really labor-intensive project. It involved doing about four things at once, and took the better part of four hours. I was exhausted after I finished, and it took me awhile to clean up. Plus, the bagels came out looking lumpy, which offended my perfectionist soul.

But they tasted…DELICIOUS! Just the right consistency, and the perfect size for a lovely breakfast without making you feel gross and overly full. And they came out to be pretty cost-effective, since I didn’t have to buy anything to make them— I had everything I needed in my kitchen already!

So, like the tomato bread, this project was of middling success. The outcome was awesome, but it took quite a lot of work to get here. When you get right down to it, I think I really can avoid buying bagels ever again (unless they’re super cheap or unless I find a really exciting new variety that I don’t know how to make at home), but we probably won’t have them that frequently.

Next time: cheese is still in the works (I’m doing it as a collaborative project with my mom, so we’ve got to work out times and days and materials and such), as is soap (I’m still waiting to find someone who is willing to help me…volunteers have been scarce, what with the highly toxic and dangerous chemicals involved, but maybe I can trick my youngest sister into helping). I’m making fudge tomorrow (peanut butter or chocolate? I can’t choose!) and I’m anticipating doing a batch of wine next month with Adam.