Bagels

I’ve been sat tapping my foot for a while now, waiting for a 15cm cake tin to arrive for me to use for panettone. It sort of made it to the house yesterday. It’s just a shame that no one was in to receive it, so it went back to the Post Office depot. A little frustrating so in the meantime I decided to make bagels.

I’ve made bagels, and using the recipe that I’m about to describe, before, but I thought it was about time to give them another go, partly inspired by one of my new friends on Twitter. This bagel recipe comes courtesy of the Hairy Bikers. As much as I like their cooking, this descriptions in this recipe were a tad unhelpful and were partly responsible for the major texture differences between my first and second attempts.

These bagels start with 500g strong white bread flour in a large mixing bowl, together with 2 teaspoons dried yeast (which I used first time round; this time, I crumbled in 20g fresh yeast), 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon clear honey and 1 beaten egg, which all got mixed together. I added 300ml warm water and worked it until it came together into a fairly sticky dough. I turned it out and worked it until the mixture was smooth and the lumps had gone, then put it into a mixing bowl to prove.

So, what was unhelpful about the method for this recipe? As I’ve made more bread, I’ve come to realise that knowing how much the dough needs to prove rather than knowing how long it needs to prove is really important. There are several things that will affect how fast dough will prove; the type of leaven you use, the activeness of the yeast, the temperature in the room where it’s proving, etc. So to me a recipe saying to put the dough aside to prove “for at least an hour” seems to lack a bit of key information. The first time I made the bagels, I left the dough for an hour, but I was using fast action yeast and that stuff seems to dislike my house. This time, using fresh yeast, I decided to leave the dough until doubled in size.

For the next step, I turned the dough out onto a floured worktop (quite well floured as it was a sticky dough) and cut it into 12 pieces. I formed each piece into a ball and then made a whole in the middle with my finger and then pulled it out to make quite a big whole (the dough tends to fight against being pulled into shape and the whole will get smaller while the dough proves for a second time). As far as I know, this isn’t the traditional method of shaping, which I think instead involves forming the dough into a long sausage shape before rolling the ends together to form a ring. But I followed the Hair Bikers’ instructions... this time round. They went onto floured baking trays for their second prove. The recipe specified a prove of “45-50 minutes”... so instead I let them double in size again.

Towards the end of proving, I preheated the oven to 230°C (gas mark 8) and got a big pan of boiling water ready.

Time to make the bagels into bagels! This bread gets its distinct texture from being boiled before being baked, so I boiled the bagels for 1-2 minutes and turned them over halfway through. When they came out of the water, they got dipped in sesame seeds. They went onto baking trays (my amazing non-stick ones that require no greasing... may want to add in that step if yours aren’t quite so non-stick) and then into the preheated oven for 10-15 minutes until golden on top.

My finished bagels looked... hmm... okay. They were a bit misshapen; the dough was still fairly soft after the second proving and I accidentally pulled some of them slightly out of shape when placing them in the water. And the sesame seeds wanted to fall off more than they wanted to stick. But the texture was right; chewy but soft and with a crunchy crust. The aeration inside was also completely different to the first time I’d made them; they’d clearly proved better this time round because the bubbles were open and irregular rather than tightly packed like last time. Overall, not bad, but not nearly as aesthetically pleasing as those made by my friend on twitter. More attempts needed methinks. And maybe with a different recipe.

References

The Hairy Bikers’ 12 Days of Christmas, Si King and Dave Myers, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010