30 by 30: Bagels

I’ve seen these bagels posted in many food blogs and they’ve always received rave reviews.  Having already made one Peter Reinhart recipe myself, I knew this recipe would be *the one* for my 30×30 list.  The version I had bookmarked initially was from Deb over at Smitten Kitchen.

I’ve always been especially nervous about making bagels for some reason; more so than any other yeast bread.  Any time I see a recipe that has “day one” and “day two” in the instructions, I get a little bit anxious.  Plus, for some reason I have a fear of yeast breads with a sponge. I’m not sure why; it just seems like they would take more effort or something.  However, these bagels were actually much easier to make than I had anticipated.  I admit I was a bit nervous when my sponge didn’t look all that “foamy” after 2 hours but I went with it, and everything turned out great.

I wanted to make everything bagels but I was lacking…well, pretty much everything. I thought I at least had poppy seeds, but no dice. Only sesame seeds.  Thankfully, sesame bagels are my second favorite, so I went with those. My husband’s favorite bagels are asiago cheese and though I had fully intended to make those for him, I completely forgot to pick up asiago.  So, he got Pecorino Romano bagels, which are also quite tasty.

I decided to make slightly-bigger-than-mini bagels (2.75 oz. each) and got 20 bagels. I used the first method for shaping them (poking a hole in the roll of dough and then slowly enlarging it with my thumb) because it seemed like it would be much, much quicker that way.   I had a hard time kneading the dough with my stand mixer (as I often do with doughs for some reason) so I ended up kneading it by hand. Geez, what decade is this? 😉 I boiled my bagels for about a minute and a half, for a slightly chewier bagel and they were the perfect texture in my opinion.

I thought these turned out pretty much perfect.  I’m glad I froze several of these because the ones I left out disappeared very quickly (let’s just say I was baking these as we were eating dinner, so we each had one for dessert).  Of course, I thawed half the ones I froze a few days later.  Oops.  Hey, that’s what they’re there for, right?

Normally, I’d type out the whole recipe for you buuuut I’m kind of too lazy to type such a lengthy recipe.  Plus, Deb has some useful notes, so it’s worth checking out her post.