Lessons in Baking: Bagels

I haven't been doing well, and I've been drowning my sorrows in baking. I've always sorta enjoyed it, but lately it has been sparking much joy, and I really look forward to the times I get to work on a baking project. I've gone a little overboard, and made several trips, both online and in person, to Sur La Table, and made the trek to the international food store in south Orange County that has amazing imports from all over the world, but especially the great organic flours from France and pearl sugars from Belgium and lingonberry jams from Sweden. (If I was more into cooking, I would have taken advantage of the paella rices from Spain and pastas from Italy and what am I talking about? See for yourself!)

In France I lived above a flower shop, but across the street from a patisserie, and the woman who owned it handmade everything in there and lived right above it and it seemed like such a dream! I would love to own a bakery but I actually don't want to deal with the business side of things, and I wonder how much the mass baking would suck. So I'll just stick to home projects. And I really want to be able to do more than just sugar cookies and white birthday cake, so I keep finding new ingredients to buy that go into all this other stuff (barley malt syrup is a thing).

I was going to make a separate blog for my baking, but who can keep up with that, so I'll just utilize the magic of digital labels. Unfortunately I didn't think to document much of my previous endeavors, so we've missed my recent attempts with hush puppies (okay, not really baking but still takes skill), challah bread, cream puffs, rosewater baguette and blueberry pie, and I only took one photo of my finished project of the bagels, but here we go.

 

Bagels

I followed a recipe from New York Times Cooking, which, I'm glad that I read through in advance because it essentially requires two days. The bagels are best served fresh (obvi) and considering the dough needs 2 hours to rise at one point, and the formed bagels need a minimum 4 hours to chill in the fridge, it's perfect to do all the prep one day and then make them the following morning, which is what I did.

It was actually not too complicated, just a bit tedious of a process, and the recommendation was to hand knead rather than use a stand mixer because the dough gets quite stiff.

This first go turned out really really well! And most of the imperfections came from the complications of trying to do all of this while simultaneously dealing with a whiny and clinging toddler. For instance: I wasn't able to make them seamlessly round, and you can see where the two edges came together and are barely holding on, but the dough sort of dries quickly and makes it very hard to mold, and that's of course right about when Sophie was getting into things and crying and needing hands-on attention. But they held on enough, so that's good.

Then, I only had sesame seeds for a topping, which are my favorite, but they had also suggested roasted garlic, which sounds amazing but I want to make as much as possible rather than buy, so that'll be a nice side project to learn. But anyway, I tried one of the sesame bagels and sooooo many fell off during the cutting-in-half process, so I learned I need to sorta press them into the dough more before baking (however I was also dipping/coating the bagels with one hand while holding Sophie in the other arm, so what can you do). The sesame bagels lifted perfectly off the baking sheet, but the plain ones stuck a little on the bottom with a slight burn. I think they were cooked just right, so I'll need to remember to add a little flour or something for the plain ones not to stick.

I really liked this recipe because it didn't include any additional sugar and I swear in America they will throw unnecessary sugar into every single crevice, and yes, I saw recipes for bagels that included sugar. (For the blueberry pie I made for the 4th, I made the crust dough in advance, and I tasted it and realized there was absolutely nothing sweet in the dough, it was very not sweet and I worried a little bit, but the pie ended up being wonderful because the sweetness came from the filling and cinnamon put on the crust. You should really start to trust yourself and remove sugar where you can!)

They turned out great! They were wonderfully crusty on the outside and light on the inside and had a great bready taste. I think in the future I'd like to experiment with some variations, like jalapeño bagels mmmm...