Make Your Own Bagels–and Live to Tell the Tale

Imperfect but delicious! These got a little mangled because they stuck to the pan and each other after rising. Note my strictures and instructions in the recipe so that the same thing doesn’t happen to you.

I find that I cannot resist sharing with you the success I’ve had with my version of whole-wheat bagels. I had tried a New York Times recipe awhile back and the results were, shall we say, underwhelming. They tasted fine, but they certainly weren’t bagels. More like flat little pillows, with basically no crust. Bah! I said at the time that I thought the basic problem was that my dough was too soft to hold its shape, especially during the boiling phase, and it turned out that I was right. One of the distinguishing characteristics of bagel dough is that it’s quite stiff, almost to the point of being dry. So take note in the recipe of the guidelines for how sticky (or rather non-sticky) the dough should be.

While I’m on the subject of how much flour to use, I also want to address this whole ridiculous “weigh your ingredients for yeast bread so that you can be sure to have the exact amount needed” oompty-oomp. I’ve read and heard that advice dozens of times, and whenever that happens I think, ‘Wait a minute. What happened to the whole “every batch of bread is different” principle?’ Supposedly the ratio of flour to water will vary depending on the weather and also the moisture content of your particular batch of flour. Well, I was so, so pleased to run across this gem of wisdom in a video about bagels by someone who really seems to know what he’s talking about:

I’m gonna start with five cups [of flour]. That’s like 650 grams, but I really just believe in stirring in a baseline rough measurement and then just kneading in more by feel. Flour absorbs more or less water depending on its protein content, whether it’s been bleached, how exactly it’s been milled, and I’m sure a million other factors. If you’re gonna follow a recipe to the gram like a robot, you’d better hope that you’re using the exact same flour as the person who wrote it used. I’d rather just use my senses–knead in flour until the dough feels right. 

Back to my bagels. I tried them again a couple of times in the last month, this time using a Cook’s Illustrated recipe as a launching pad. As with many/most CI recipes, the original is unbearably fussy. (I say that as a devoted reader of the magazine.) I think this version was mentioned in a cooking newsletter that linked to the recipe. Normally, back recipes for the magazine and the two cooking shows that are all a part of the America’s Test Kitchen media empire aren’t available to non-subscribers, but this one was. So I read it and was impressed with several of their details:

  1. They have only one rise, which takes place after you’ve shaped the bagels. So once you’ve mixed the dough, a very easy process, you can just go ahead and shape it. There’s an hour-long rise at that point and then you put the whole shebang into the fridge to sit overnight. Your job is over until you boil and bake them the next day.
  2. They have you use malt syrup only in the bagels and not in the boiling-water bath, which some recipes do and which is very wasteful since you just throw the bathwater out. (But not the baby. Er, bagels.) Barley malt syrup is fairly expensive, so you don’t want to use it where you don’t have to.
  3. They give you a specific measurement for amount of water that you put in the boiling bathwater. This is not always, or even usually, the case. They are also somewhat restrained in the amount of baking soda they have you put in the water, and I think they’ve gotten it just right. The crust produced with their amount is crispy and chewy but doesn’t have that soda taste to it that you can get with other, unrestrained recipes.
  4. They carefully spell out how to shape the bagels, and they emphasize that the extra manipulation they call for also adds to the bagels’ chewiness. I found that using their method was very easy and effective. I’ve never had much luck with the poking-a-hole-in-the-dough method, anyway, as my holes always close up. These didn’t.
  5. They had a great, great idea for baking the bagels, which I’ve revised a bit and which I think is a big key to the recipe’s success. Basically, you’re trying to replicate a commercial steam oven. So you use a baking stone or steel if you have it, you heat the oven to a fairly high temp, and you have a pan of boiling water sitting right on that stone or steel, or at least on the lowest rack of your oven. You let the pan of water sit in your hot oven producing steam while you do the boiling step. CI calls for the bagels to be baked on racks, not in pans, which means that the bagels are much more exposed to the steam than they would be if baked on a regular baking sheet. I decided to take their rather-complicated idea (which involves putting metal cooling racks inside rimmed baking sheets filled with water) and instead use the same technique as I’ve done on our outside grill, putting foil over the actual oven rack, spraying the foil with cooking spray, and poking lots of holes in the foil. If you’re sure that your oven racks are immaculate (which mine certainly aren’t), and you don’t mind spraying them (which I do), then you could skip the foil step. Or you could use metal cooling racks that have been sprayed, but that’s a messy and wasteful process. Or . . . a technique that I may use next time, you can put foil on your cooling racks and also do the foil-poking thing with those. I’ll report back on that version when I re-do this recipe. The drawback to using your oven racks is that you get those indentations shown in the picture. No biggy, but if it bothers you then there’s another option.

I’ve cut out a couple of fiddly steps that I can’t imagine would make much of a difference—letting the dough rest 10 minutes here and 15 minutes there and making the dough pieces into smooth, perfectly-shaped round balls, pieces of dough that you’re then going to make into logs, so what earthly difference could it possibly make that you started out with round balls? Also, the recipe size is weird. They call for 2 2/3 cups of flour, which is supposed to make eight 3.5-ounce bagels. It doesn’t make eight. It makes seven. (I’m not alone in this quibble; there were quite a few comments on the recipe that mentioned the same issue.) Plus, why on earth would you want to go to all the effort called for in order to make that small of a yield? Yes, they’re best fresh out of the oven, but I had a leftover one this morning that had been frozen and then toasted, and it was really good. (I’m sure my brother-in-law-in-law, married to my sister-in-law, would disagree, but he’s a crust fanatic. I’m going to make a batch of these the next time he visits, hoping that he likes them and that he’s not following a keto diet any more.) I’ve re-jiggered the measurements so that the recipe yields a dozen.

As far as I can tell, the keys to success are: using lots of added gluten, getting the dough to the right consistency, using the correct ingredients in the water bath, letting the uncooked bagels sit overnight in the fridge, and doing the steam-oven-imitation thingy mentioned above. By the way, I am totally puzzled by both the oven temp and the baking time called for in most recipes, including the CI one. The usual temp is 450 degrees, with some up to 475 or 500 degrees. And they usually call for a baking time of around 20 minutes. Honestly! That would produce lumps of coal. As you can see in my picture, these bagels got very dark, and at least one of them had some black–and I baked them for only 15 minutes. And yes, my oven temp is correct. I’ve tested it with an oven thermometer. So I’ve lowered the temp to 425 degrees with a minimum time of 15 minutes.

I give the main recipe below for plain whole-wheat bagels, with ideas for variations, including cinnamon/raisin. (Even though I hate and despise raisins in everything else, I like them in breads. I’m planning to use currants, though, which are basically just little raisins but which somehow seem less . . . terrible.)

Okay–here it is:

Whole Wheat Bagels with Variations

These are perfectly doable, and I've taken out the fiddly-and-unnecessary steps but left in the vital ones. Give them a try! This recipe is based on one from Cook's Illustrated; I have simplified and streamlined their procedure and sized up the recipe to give you at least a dozen.

Course Bread
Cuisine American
Keyword bagels
Servings 12 bagels
Author Debi Simons

Ingredients

For the dough:

  • 1 3/4 cup water, cool or room temp; doesn't need to be warm,
  • 1/4 cup barley malt syrup, usually available at the grocery store; definitely available at a place such as Whole Foods or Sprouts. The brand I've always bought is Eden.
  • 4 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour, preferaly freshly ground, but otherwise either white whole wheat or regular whole-wheat flour, with the freshest possible sell-by date.
  • 1/2 cup gluten, usually labeled "vital wheat gluten," available at the grocery store in the baking aisle or online.
  • 2 teaspoons table salt

For the shaping and boiling:

  • Extra flour for kneading and shaping
  • Cornmeal for sprinkling the pans
  • 4 quarts water (1 gallon, in other words)
  • 1 tablespoon baking soda
  • 1/4 cup sugar

Instructions

To make the dough:

  1. Stir the 1 3/4 cups water and the barley malt syrup together and then mix with the flour, gluten and yeast. (If you have a 2-cup liquid measuring cup, you can just add the syrup to the water until the liquid comes up to the 2-cup mark, thus saving yourself a sticky 1/4-cup item to wash.) Whatever equipment you use, or if you just stir the dough together with a spoon, you want to get all of the flour well incorporated with no streaks. I use my bread machine and let it run on the "dough" cycle until it's mixed and then I turn it off. CI has you use a processor, pouring the water/syrup mixture through the tube into the flour/gluten/yeast mixture while it's running and keeping it going for about 20 seconds. You could also use the dough hook with your stand mixer.

  2. Let the dough stand for 10 minutes. This is the only fiddly let-the-dough-sit step I kept from the original recipe, but it seems to be fairly important as it gives the water time to hydrate the flour before you add the salt. (It's called "autolyse.")

  3. Add the salt to the dough and mix well, however you want to do that. I just turn the bread machine back on and let it run for a few more minutes.

  4. Dump the dough out and knead briefly just to make sure that the salt has been evenly distributed. You will probably need to add more flour to make the dough smooth and un-sticky. Bagel dough should be quite firm, almost but not quite to the point of being dry. Then (and here's where the kitchen scale will come in handy) divide the dough into 12 pieces, which will be a little over 3 ounces each. I find that size to be about right--huge, pillowy bagels are not what you want. You can use a bench scraper or a big chef's knife to divide the dough up, so you may want to transfer your dough to a cutting board at this point. Cover the pieces with plastic wrap while you work on the next step.

  5. Figure out what baking sheets or other pans you can use to let the bagels rise overnight in the fridge. I can't fit a standard-size 13 x 8 sheet in my own fridge , but I have access to another one that does accommodate that size. Depending on your own situation, you may have to use several smaller pans. Whatever you end up using, I'd advise spraying the pans with cooking spray before you sprinkle their bottoms with a fair amount of cornmeal to keep the bagels from sticking. It wouldn't hurt to line the pans with wax or parchment paper first, if you want to avoid washing the pans. Plan to leave plenty of room between the bagels for them to rise; I've found that trying to get all 12 bagels onto one 13 x 8 pan leads to smushed-together bagels once they've risen. Maybe 8 on one regular pan and the other 4 on a smaller one is the way to go.

  6. Roll each piece of dough into a snake shape with tapered ends, maybe 8-10" long. Twist the ends in opposite directions so that there's somewhat of a spiraling effect. Wrap the log around your knuckles/palm, overlap the ends by a couple of inches on your palm, and squeeze to seal them together. You can also roll that join back and forth on the counter to make sure it's well sealed. Stretch the ring out so that the middle hole is at least 2" wide. As you make them, place the shaped bagels on the baking sheet(s) and cover with plastic wrap. Let them sit for an hour if you can possibly do so, as this step helps let the yeast get started working before you refrigerate the bagels. If it's 10:30 PM and you really need to get to bed, the world isn't going to come to an end if you just skip this step. The bagels won't rise as much, though. You could perhaps let them rise awhile in the morning at room temp before you boil them.

  7. After an hour, add some plastic wrap going the other way over the bagels (so that you're really guarding against the bagels' drying out) and put the pan(s) into the fridge overnight. They can sit as long as 24 hours. CI says that they have to be refrigerated for at least 16 hours, but 8-12 hours is perfectly fine.

  8. I've lowered the baking temp to 4250 from the 4500 that the original recipe calls for. If you're using a stone or steel, which is highly recommended, and you want to bake the bagels first thing in the morning, you can set your oven to turn on early so that everything is nice and hot when you get up. Leave the stone or steel in the oven so that it heats up gradually with the oven. (Sorry to tell you what you already know.)

  9. Pour several cups of boiling water into a pan you can set directly on the baking stone or steel or onto the lowest possible rack of the oven and let that sit and fill the oven with steam while you boil the bagels. I used my biggest Pyrex baking dish here, pouring some of the boiling water into it before setting it on the stone and then pouring in the rest. I'm paranoid about shattering glass baking dishes after having that happen to me once, so putting some of the water in ahead of placing it on the stone should prevent any risk of that happening. A big metal baking dish would work better, if you have that. A rimmed baking sheet is too shallow to hold the volume of water you need. Prepare the rack or racks that you're going to use for baking the bagels. The most straightforward way to do this is to use one of your oven racks, covered with foil sprayed with cooking spray and with plenty of holes poked into the foil. You could also cover metal cooling racks with foil and do the spraying-and-poking routine.

  10. Bring the water, sugar and baking soda to a boil in a big pot. I use my stock/soup pot. You can do at least three bagels at a time; depending on the size of your pot you can possibly do four. You may neeed to cut between the risen bagels if their sides are touching, but if you left them plenty of room then you shouldn't have to do this. Quickly put the group of bagels into the water and let them boil for 20-30 seconds. (Some recipes say it should be 2-3 minutes! That's crazy talk!) Try to keep track of the order in which you put the bagels in the water and flip them over in the same order, using the tool of your choice--I use a small spatula with holes. Let the other sides boil for the same amount of time, then remove them to the rack(s) you're going to use for baking,

  11. Place the rack(s) in the middle of the oven, re-closing the oven door as quickly as possible to keep in the steam. Bake for 10 minutes; the tops of the bagels should be browned. Flip the bagels over and bake another 5-10 minutes. You want them good and brown, but don't overdo it. Sorry about the large-ish range on time, but every oven is different and I don't want you to burn these little lovelies. They're great eaten warm or within a few hours. After that you need to slice and freeze them for use later. Leftover bagels are best toasted, but the fresh ones don't need it.

Recipe Notes

Variations:

  1. Add 2 teaspoons cinnamon with the salt. Knead in 1/2-2/3 cup raisins or currants, or to taste.
  2. Possible toppings: coarse salt, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, dried onion flakes, or some type of "everything" topping. Sprinkle salt on top right after boiling; quickly dip tops of bagels into the other ones right after boiling, having spread out a layer of the topping on a plate.
  3. Add 1/2 - 3/4 tsp. granulated garlic with the salt.

Having mentioned my brother-in-law-in-law above the recipe, let me tell you something about my sister-in-law here: She likes garlic bagels with honey-walnut cream cheese. She has never persuaded me to try this seemingly-horrible combination. My husband has tried it and says that it’s “not as bad as you might think.” Hardly a ringing endorsement–but hey! To each his (or her) own.

And let me close this v-e-r-y l-o-n-g post by including the video from the guy quoted above. He’s doing a variation of New York bagels that’s apparently from Montreal, and he uses honey instead of malt syrup–which you can certainly do. He’s just great–and has the viewing numbers to prove it. His recipe is very similar to mine (but mine is better), and he gives an excellent explanation of the sticky/non-sticky issue with bagel dough. His boiling times are way too long–he’s one of the 2-minutes-per-side people, and he says that the longer boil gives a thicker, more chewy crust. Well, maybe his jaws are stronger than mine, but I wouldn’t want more of a crust on mine than I get with the 30-second boil.