Bagels

I decided to try bagels this week. They were fun. Pretty easy, actually. And quite tasty. I used these instructions, but modified the recipe from one I found... and have since lost. So no link to the original. But here's what I did:

Homemade bagel recipe

4 cups whole wheat flour
1 Tbls honey
1 1/2 tsps salt
1 Tbls vegetable oil
2 tsps instant yeast
1-1/2+ cups of hot water
1 Tbs lemon juice
1/4 cup warm water

I'm experimenting with soaking my grains, so I ground the wheat (hurray for food storage rotation), and put it in a bowl with the honey and 1 1/2 cups hot water, and the lemon juice. It was really dry, so I added more water until it looked better. Then I left it sitting on my counter overnight. The lemon juice was supposed to break down an acid in the wheat, so that it was more readily digested... I'm still learning about that soaking thing. In any case, it wasn't really a factor in the final taste. It tasted like... bread.

The next morning, I did the bread thing. Added the yeast, which made things REALLY runny, probably because I'd added that extra water before. But I added more evil regular white flour until it was a pretty normal bread texture. The wheat flour was really coarse, which I think has more to do with my tiny little grinder (what can you expect, for $15?) than anything else. So I needed some regular flower for a decent bread texture. Cut the dough into 8 balls, and let 'em rest. Just like my bagel instructions said, I rolled them out into snakes, turned them into a loop (the dough was quite sticky still, so that was easy), and left them to rest a few more minutes. Then I plopped them into a vat of boiling water.



This was tricky. They were sticky, I was worried they'd look weird because they were a bit deformed, going in. No biggie. One minute each side, drain on a dishtowel. Park the boiled, drained bagels on a greased cookie sheet to wait for their companions. Throw the towel down the laundry chute when you're done because it's sticky.



The only snag I ran into was the instructions say your cookies sheet ought to be "lightly" oiled, so I decided that I had too much and wiped some off. Bad Idea. They stuck and tore when it was time to flip them after 10 minutes at 425. It was very sad. But I transferred them to another cookie sheet. This time I used Pam & they were sliding around all over the place. Of course, they were cooked-side-down at this point too. But the other side finished cooking and they were delicious. I should have taken a picture in the 20 minutes that you have to wait for them after they come out of the oven. But I didn't. And then I realized they were all gone and I had no pictures of the finished product. But let me assure you, even though they were not beautiful bagels, they tasted amazing with homemade pumpkin butter on them.