Homemade Bagels

Over the past few weeks I had several friends make bagels, so while we were snowed in, I set out to try my hand at making homemade bagels! I was impressed with how easy it was and how good the bagels turned out. I make a good bit of yeast bread from scratch, which is pretty easy, but takes a while because of the different rises. These bagels were easier and quicker!

The recipe that I used can be found here. I followed it pretty exactly, though since I used my Kitchen Aid, I only had to knead for 2-3 minutes.

The recipe:
4 cups bread flour
1 Tbls sugar
1 1/2 tsps salt
1 Tbls vegetable oil
2 tsps instant yeast
1-1/4- 1-1/2 cups of warm water


Mix all ingredients together:
Bagels make a thicker and more stiff dough than regular bread dough

Knead until you have a smooth dough, then divide into 8 pieces and let the dough sit on the counter for 10-20 minutes.

Use 2 hands and roll each ball into a snake until it is longer than both your hands side by side.

Take one of the snakes and wrap it around your hand so the two ends meet.

Then use the counter and a rolling motion to fuse the ends together and create a circle (this is surprisingly easy!)

You'll end up with a little family of rings. Let them sit on the counter for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, boil a pot of water on the stove, and preheat oven to 425 F. The bagels will start to look puffy after 20 minutes.

Once they have rested for 20 minutes, boil for 1 minute, then use a slotted spoon to flip each bagel over and boil for another 1 minute. I put them on a bamboo cutting board for a minute or two so they were not soaking wet when I put them on a greased baking sheet. Then bake at 425. The recipe I linked to says to bake for 10 minutes, flip, and bake for 10 more minutes, but I found baking for 15-20 minutes without flipping worked fine too.

Here is a look at my assembly line:

Bagels boiling, cutting board to let them dry a little, plate full of cinnamon sugar that I dipped the bagels in, and lightly greased baking sheet with my bagels.

And the finished product? They looked, smelled, and tasted like real bagels! (You'll notice in this picture that there are only 7...we had already sampled one...)

Little munchkin agrees - they are delicious!

We also used them to make pizza bagels for dinner. I may have to double the recipe next time, because we ate these in 2 days!