30 by 30: Bagels

11

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.

30 by 30: Bagels

blogherads.adq.push(['Middle1', 'skm-ad-Middle1']);
//

11 thoughts on “30 by 30: Bagels

  1. Yay! Bagels! Love your pictures of them … still on my to-do list (I have the same apprehensions you talked about) but they look so good, I must let those go 🙂

  2. These bagels were my first really complicated yeast recipe and they were totally worth it! I made cinnamon raisin and they blew every other NYC bagel out of the water, in my opinion, just because the raisins and cinnamon taste so fresh! i’m so glad you tackled this beast of a recipe! The bagels look like they turned out gorgeously!

  3. I also think bagels seem like such an intimidating thing to make at home. Someday I’ll get over that, and just go for it. For now, though, I’ll settle for admiring yours 🙂

    I also relate to the idea of freezing food, then feeling bad when I thaw it only a few days later. I have some sort of random instinct to preserve food… but have to remind myself that I’ve made the food for the sake of eating it, so thawing it out is ok! Sounds like I’m not the only one who feels this way? I think I would have hardly been able to resist those bagels, anyway!

Leave a Reply to Sarah Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *