Bagels ep.1 - The Bagel Pilgrimage Begins

Whats poppin, its Dough Dylan bringing you the freshest content available on the internet, delivered in the most hip format possible...a blog of course.

Today marks the start of my bagel journey - perfecting the bagel recipe. Chewy but crunchy, soft and puffy yet sturdy, bagels are a balance of opposites. They are objectively the best way to start any day, if made correctly. Now, I have wayyy too much Italian New Yorker blood flowing through me, it's slightly disgraceful that its taken me this long to start studying the art of bagels. So I've decided to change that today. 

I've made bagels once before years ago and they turned out surprisingly well, especially for the severe lack of research and effort that I put into them. I literally googled bagel recipes and used the first one I found from AllRecipes or something. It worked for me somehow. But I want to put in just a tad more effort and understanding behind the science of bagels, so obviously I turned to reddit. r/Bagels was more than happy to help me start my bagel pilgrimage and I quickly found that the hot new thing was this recipe from a comp sci Ph.D student named Thai. Literally every other reddit post referred to this recipe, so I had to give it a shot. I was happy to find that Thai, a student of science, took a very scientific approach to the study of the bagel recipe. They discussed their goal, the background science of the malt and the boiling process, and included many pictures to document the process. If you're not currently a bagel scientist, I can pinky promise you will be after this bagel journey with me. Now, the length of this bagel series is likely longer than my lifetime, as I expect to continue to pursue the perfect bagel for a very long time, but I hope to get a pretty good recipe down while I'm still sentient. 

Now that I've fulfilled my lifelong dream of being one of those pesky annoying recipe bloggers that takes a week and a half to get to their point, I'll actually give you the recipe we are using today.

Recipe:

• 1250 g High-gluten Flour
• 625 g Water
• 6.25 g Instant Yeast
• 31.25 g Kosher Salt
• 37.5 g Neutral Oil (grapeseed, sunflower, avocado)
• 62.5 g Dark Brown Sugar
• 1 tbsp Baking Soda (for boiling water)
• A large spoonful of honey (for boiling water)

I quickly realized that Ralphs is not the place to purchase quality baking items (plz sponsor me @WholeFoods). So, for todays recipe, I had to settle for bread flour (I added 30 g Vital Wheat Gluten to increase the protein content), dry active yeast (yes there is a difference), and table salt ( I KNOW ITS WRONG, pls dont yell at me). So now that I completely changed the recipe and basically set myself up for disaster (aka a good lesson), lets get started. 

Combine the dry ingredients. Mix in the wet ingredients. Knead the dough for about 10 minutes in a stand mixer with a dough hook. In keeping with the tradition of lacking the correct tools, I had to adapt to the lack of a stand mixer and set out to knead by hand. Since this dough has such a low hydration level, you won't really be able to use the window pane test, but it should start to stretch more easily. 15 minutes later I had what resembled a decent dough, see Figure 1 below. 

Figure 1: Freshly hand-kneaded dough

You should let your dough rest covered for about 30 minutes to an hour. It was at this point that I decided to go run a 5k to get out my zoomies, so let your dough rest however long it takes Dylan to do a 5k (aka a long time).

After the rest, the dough should be fairly soft and easy to shape. Start dividing the dough into ~140g pieces (for a hefty medium-sized bagel) and roll them into strips and use this technique to form the strips around your hand to create the distinct bagel shape, pressing firmly to seal them. Make sure to do this on a surface that is not floured, it will be wayyy too slippery and just won't work. And you should definitely listen to me because if you haven't realized by now, I am obviously an expert. 

Figure 2: Bagels after being "shaped"

Once you get your bagels to look like my mediocre ovals, you're ready to go. Rest these covered at room temp for about 1 hour, and then into the fridge overnight they go. Cya tomorrow.

It's now tomorrow, crazy how time works. 

12-24 hours later, preheat your oven to 450 and boil a large pot of water. Add the spoonful of honey and tbsp of baking soda to the water and keep at a gentle boil. Boil the bagels for 15-20 seconds per side. Place the boiled bagels back onto a baking sheet, good side up. Top with whatever your heart desires (if you don't make at least 1 everything bagel, you can stop reading this right now and go find a different recipe. you are simply wrong.)

Bake for about 10-15 minutes until desired color is achieved. Now hopefully you have something that resembles a bagel, my "bagels" can be judged below in Figure 3. 

Figure 3: The final product

A note of caution. Things in the oven are hot. Like very hot. That includes these sheet trays. When removing them from the oven, please use adequate PPE. I may or may not have burnt a hole through the oven mitt I used, and therefore burnt a hole in my hand. You live and you learn. I did not expect the bagels to fight back. I will be more prepared next time.

Now, I did not set myself up for success here so I can't complain too much. I did notice my dough struggling to float when I boiled them, likely due to how dense it was and possibly the yeast not yeasting or the knead not kneading. Overall, they taste decent, the inside is soft and relatively fluffy but definitely more dense than they should be. The skin was definitely too thick, likely due to too long in the boil bath. They kind of had the texture of a soft pretzel, which if I was making pretzels would be great, but for bagels, not so great. And after 15 minutes of baking, they still didn't get that dark golden brown (the color of that spot on the parchment on the bottom right in Figure 3) that I need my bagels to have. Also, the everything bagel seasoning I purchased premade from, you guessed it, Ralphs, was too salty. So lets go over some lessons learned so I can have notes for myself for next time.

1. Buy the correct ingredients (@Ralphs you really gotta step your game up)
2. Lean on the shorter side for the boil bath, ~15 seconds
3. Figure out the density issue. Yeast? Kneading? 
4. Egg wash or similar for color?
5. Learn to shape the bagels better
6. Bagel boards? Pizza stone??

Okay that's all I can think of right now. Have I achieved blogger chef status now? Sorry you had to go through all that. See you all on bagels ep. 2 once my hand heals. 

xoxo,

Dyl