Show and Tell: Wheat Sourdough Bagels!

Around this time last year, I found myself sitting on my friend Stuart´s terrace in the sun with a beer and 3 or 4 other British and American friends chatting about bagels. We missed them. I like Spanish food but have not come across a single bagel shop, a lone bagel in a bakery somewhere, or even a tasteless frozen bagel since arriving.

Last summer, one of my top "American things to do while home before leaving for 9 more months" was having a toasted asiago cheese bagel with smoked gouda artichoke schmear from Bloomington Bagel Company. It was like heaven.

The beauty of a bagel lies in its versatility. For breakfast with butter or cream cheese or jam or peanut butter or.... For lunch or a mid-day snack, combining any flavor of bagel you can imagine with whatever cream cheese you fancy that day. Or for a heartier meal, slather on hummus and veggies, or anything else in the world for a bagel sandwich. Pretzel bagels, bagel pizzas, bagel chips, unsliced, sliced, toasted or not, sweet, salty, savory, sitting down with friends and a glass of iced tea or on the go on the way to class or work, any hour of the day or night with anything on it you can imagine.

Brilliant.

And even though I probably think about, dream about, and crave bagels at least 3 or 4 times a week, this weekend was the first time it dawned on me to try to make them myself. Expecting a disaster, I was pleasantly surprised with how they turned out. Here's the photo evidence and a few details on how to make them.



Step One: Make dough and roll into balls
I made up the recipe for the dough after looking at a couple bagel-making tips online. Here's the basic idea: Combine active yeast, a little warm water, a bit of salt and sugar for the taste, about a cup of sourdough starter, and a LOT of wheat flour and a little white flour. Knead it all together for a very long time. Keep adding more flour until the dough is very thick (aka thicker than normal bread dough.) Keep kneading until it passes the "windowpane test", or until your hands are so tired that you don't feel like continuing. Separate into equal sized balls, the size that seems appropriate for the bagel size you want. Cover lightly with olive oil so they won't stick to the plate, and let rise for 1 hour.




Step Two: Make bagel shape out of dough
Roll out into fat snakes (Play-Doh style) until about as long as 2 hands are wide. Form into circles around your thumb. Pinch the two ends together and roll together a bit until they look normal and are well stuck. Put them back on the plate and let rise another hour. Picture with my hand so you get an idea of the size of my bagels.



Step Three: What makes the difference between a holey roll and a bagel
Bring a pot of water to boil. Put the bagels in a few at a time so that they're not crowded. Leave them in 10 to 15 seconds on one side, then flip over and leave the other side in the water for 10 to 15 seconds. Take out, let the water drip off for a couple of seconds, and put them on a greased baking sheet.

Then bake until they are cooked through. Will depend on the oven. For mine, a crappy oven probably from the 50s that has no way of setting the temperature and only heats from the top, this means putting them on the lowest rack in the oven at what I estimate to be somewhere between 300 and 400 degrees F for 15 minutes, then flipping with a spatula and baking the other side for 15 minutes more.

Step Four: Eat it.
Let cool for a few minutes so you don't burn yourself. Then slice or don't, toast or don't, and put whatever you want on it. SO tasty! (Especially after 6 months without eating one.) They taste much better the day you bake them than the next day, but are still relatively soft the second day. I wouldn't wait until the third day, though I ate all of my bagels before the end of day two, so I'm not sure.





Maybe I'll write a cookbook. "Kitchen inventions for people who don't mind estimating (a lot)."

Or not.