So I decided to make my own. This took research from old cookbooks, looking into the science, experimentation, and even finding an old amateur home move made in the 70's by a man who wanted everybody to know his love for bagels and actually got one of the ubiquitous bagel bakeries in Brooklyn to walk him through all the steps of how they made bagels.
This recipe will make 12 medium or 8 large bagels. I use it to make 8 large bagels and will refer to it accordingly. Note that this makes bagels with a lot of chew. If you like fluffier bagels, skip adding the gluten and use AP flour. If you are taking the time to make this from scratch, you make it how you like it and don't let anybody judge you for how you like it.
You will need:
- 1 pack or 3/4 teaspoon instant yeast
- 1 teaspoon salt (use a humble inexpensive kind, bagels are a proletariat bread)
- 1 3/4 cup cold water
- 4 cups flour. You can use bleached white all purpose flour and it will turn out okay (fluffy, but okay). If you want it to be really the right consistency though, use high gluten flour. I use King Arthur High Gluten Flour (also known as King Arthur's Sir Lancelot Flour, so named because it is the finest and mightiest of their flours. Seriously.)
- 8 teaspoons vital wheat gluten. You will want at least 1 tablespoon per cup flour for lower gluten flours.
- Malt syrup
- Cornmeal.
- Toppings (optional): coarse salt, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, dried onion, dried garlic, whatever. For Everything Bagels mix equal parts onion, sesame seed, and poppy seed.
- baking soda or potassium bicarbonate
Sieve flour, salt, vital wheal gluten into bowl of stand mixer with a dough hook. Add 1 teaspoon salt.
If you have instant yeast, you can add it directly into the flour. If instead you have Active Dry Yeast, wait to add it because the recipe changes slightly: Add a pack of yeast to 1/4 cup warm water along with a teaspoon sugar, then stir to dissolve and set aside. If after ten minutes it is not frothy, your yeast is dead and you need to stop cooking, throw it out, and get new yeast. Be sure to change the amount of water added later to 1 1/2 cups instead of 1 3/4 cups so that it balances out.
Turn stand mixer on the lowest speed.
Add ~3 tablespoons (a generous couple of glugs) malt syrup to 1 cup cold water and stir to dissolve.
If you used the Active Dry Yeast, now is the time to add it. Rinse the cup with the yeast mixture out with the water/malt syrup mixture in order to get all the yeast, adding the water to the flour a little bit at a time.
The first cup of water (with the malt syrup) can be added pretty quickly. Add the last half cup or 3/4 cup very slowly- you are looking for a very shaggy consistency where it just comes together into a shaggy ball. Then add a tiny amount more water and leave the machine to continue to work the dough. The shagginess should go away after a minute to two and the dough come together. The last few tablespoons added in the end should make the dough slide around in the bowl, and that is okay, it is how you know it is the right amount.
This is a very dry, dense dough. It is very sensitive to water content; if you add too much water, the texture will be affected. Continue to work the dough for a few more minutes until you are certain that the moisture has worked its way through. Baking is sensitive to a lot of things like the kitchen's temperature and humidity, so you may need to add a little more or a little less water, which is why you are adding the final half cup a little bit at a time.
Remove the bowl and set aside, covered, for ten minutes. This gives the gluten time to form, chemicals to break down, wheat granules time to absorb moisture, etc.
Put the bowl back and knead again for another 2-3 minutes. Take the lump of dough out and cut into 8 equal pieces. Cover and leave on the countertop for ten minutes.
While the dough is rising, take out a baking sheet. Make sure that you have a shelf in your refrigerator large enough (and cleared) to accommodate the sheet. Sprinkle the sheet generously with cornmeal.
Roll a dough piece into a ball shape by pressing a flat palm firmly against it and rolling- you may see the dough having twisted around and forming a navel (or even a second one on the bottom) as you do so. If you do, congratulations, you are doing well! As you roll, you will feel the dough tighten under your hand- you are bringing the dough together and adding strain to the structure, which helps develop the chew.
You should feel the dough as quite silky, dense, tough. Flatten out and roll out with a rolling pin. You don't need to go too crazy with this, you are looking for 5 mm or under (a little under 1/4 inch). Flip it over and re-roll as needed. Set the rolling pin aside and roll one edge all the way to the other side into a nice, tight cylinder- like a rolled up newspaper. Roll it back and forth a couple of times until it is ~8 inches or so long. Twist the dough cylinder a couple of times, like wringing out a towel.
If you have small hands, use all four fingers for this next step. If you have huge hands like me, use the forefinger, middle, and ring finger. Form the twisted cylinder into a ring with the ends overlapping one another. Classically you do this by wrapping the cylinder around your fingers and rolling the two ends together. Place rolled bagel dough onto the baking sheet with cornmeal.
Many instructions will tell you to just punch a hole through the middle of the dough ball with your thumb and stretch it out. I have seen arguments back and forth about whether or not this is proper. I don't do it, because the Bagelmen of old didn't, and they did it long and often enough to have tried doing that, and they didn't.
You want to be pretty quick about these last couple of steps so that the bagels are all in place before they have a chance to dry out. The speed comes with practice, so do not be afraid to have some plastic wrap you can drape over the dough as you roll out more bagels. Good bagels do not have a huge hole, and the dough in this shape wants to retract into a smaller form. With the dough in your hand you can gently squeeze the dough to encourage that retraction and make the hole smaller. Do not go crazy with this; between rising, boiling, and baking much of the hole will fill in so don't worry about it too too much.
Repeat process until all eight bagels have been made. Cover pan with plastic wrap and set aside ten minutes, then place in refrigerator overnight.
The next day:
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Take the sheetpan out of the fridge and set on your countertop to warm a little before boiling.
Bagels removed from fridge
Experiments with changing active ingredients in the boiling water.
From left to right- sugar, baking soda, plain water, and malt syrup.
There are a million different suggestions for what to add to the water. I experimented with a bunch:
Just water: Did not brown brilliantly, skin was thin. Slight sweetness to the dough.
Sugar: Bland and dull. Tasted like something from a supermarket.
Baking soda: Great browning, skin texture good. Nice flavor.
Malt syrup: Browning okay, skin texture great with a little crisp to it. Nice flavor.
Vinegar: Did not brown well. Stank up kitchen. No particular taste.
Baking soda and malt syrup: Very nice. Good browning, great skin texture, nice flavor.
Potassium bicarbonate: Great browning, more intense than baking soda, skin texture too soft. Great flavor.
Calcium carbonate: Almost inedible. Pale white with a tinge of brown in spots, the calcium carbonate somehow deposited a visible layer over the whole bagel (and on the bottom of the pot too!). Unpleasant skin, flavor was doughy.
Potassium bicarbonate and malt syrup: The winner for me, which is lucky since I have to cut my sodium. Great skin, great browning, great flavor, a real winner. That said, it is almost exactly the same as baking soda and malt syrup, to the point that there may be variations like the dough and the temperature and such influencing the test, as these are very close.
Sodium hydroxide probably works beautifully, but I have to watch my sodium. If you decide to handle lye in your kitchen, you are responsible for handling it safely. I do not condone its use for most people. I am a professional chemist and have been trained in the safe handling of hazardous chemicals, while you probably have not. You have been warned.
Bagels post-boil. Note the color change compared to when taken from the fridge.
If you are going to add toppings, now is one of the two times to do it.
Place cooling rack onto a new sheet pan, then place in the hot oven. After 3 minutes, remove the rack and baking sheet from the oven. Take the bagels off of the cooling rack and flip them over onto the baking sheet; the top skin will have begun to dry and harden.
The gel layer that forms on the outside of the bagel after being boiled will act like a glue and attach the bagel to whatever surface it is on. By flipping it, you use the already dried skin as the contact layer, so that it does not stick. If you wait more than three minutes, the bagels will stick to the wire rack and be more difficult to remove, potentially ruining the skin.
If you are going to add toppings, this is the second time to do it. Sprinkle the toppings on top of the bagels (now it is actually the top of the bagel). Stick the baking sheet with the bagels back into the oven. Continue to bake for 10 minutes, flip the bagels, bake for another 10 minutes. Remove from oven, then remove bagels to cooling rack.
Final Product
Some notes:
- That's a lot of work just for 8 bagels, and my fridge is big- is there a way to scale this up and maybe make a double batch?
- Yes and no. Yes, the recipe does at least double. However, the trouble is the time it takes to roll out each bagel. When there are only 8, the bagels are not sitting out on your counter for very long before going into the fridge. When there are 16, this time becomes significant, and the earlier rolled bagels will overprove. If you have more than one person rolling the dough together, you can get away with this. If you are doing this by yourself, I would instead suggest two batches instead.
- As an aside, I have a professional series kitchen aid stand mixer with all metal gears. This was a very deliberate purchase. I have owned this stand mixer for ten years. When I doubled the recipe, for the first time I could smell the motor overheating, and it shut itself off from it. I had read of the automatic overheating shutoff, but never actually seen it. If you double this recipe, make sure your equipment can handle it.
- Is there a way to make these ahead of time?
- Absolutely! Make the bagels all the way through baking them for the initial 3 minutes to tighten the skin. Then take the bagels and stick them into freezer bags and freeze them. When you are ready to cook them, place on baking sheet, frozen, and stick them into a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes, flip, then 5 more minutes. This is also a good way to prepare large batches of them ahead of time (see previous question)- 8 bagel batches are much easier to handle, and you can just make a bunch of them and freeze them, so you have freshly baked bagels anytime!
- Eight bagels! How can I possibly eat so many all at once? How do I prevent them from going stale?
- After the bagels have cooled, they are best enjoyed within two or three hours. If you will not eat them within that time, place into freezer bag and freeze. You can microwave on high for 30-45 seconds if you have a powerful microwave, or a full minute if you have a puny microwave like me.
