Bagels

Having tasted my older brother's heavenly bagels and having large amounts of time on my hands, I decided to attempt making my own this week. It was a two day event and I began last night at 6pm before I went to meet a friend for dinner. I decided to use a recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, considered by many to be the bread-making bible. The first stage was to make the "sponge." 

This was made up of just the first half of the flour, half the yeast and some water. When I got back from dinner about two hours later, I added the rest of the ingredients to make the actual dough. This included some honey and I decided to use a jar of local Savannah honey given to me by a friend (Thanks, friend!). 

I then had to knead this dough for about 10 minutes. I had a vague idea of what kneading should look like but wasn't exactly sure. I thought about YouTubing it but decided that might stifle my creativity. I did look up a video afterwards and my method was... similar. At least I don't have an audience when I bake. 

After that, I divided the dough into twelve balls. This only took me two tries, slightly disturbing as my job involves a fair amount of math. 

I then had to let the dough "rest" for 20 minutes. Shhh... the dough is sleeping...

After this, I used my thumb to punch a whole into the middle of the dough to form the traditional bagel shape.

The bagels then got covered in plastic wrap and left in the fridge overnight.

This morning I actually set an alarm to get up "early" to bake the bagels. AP had warned me that if I left the bagels in the fridge for too long, they could fall and I did NOT want my bagels to fail. Not on my watch. Next, the bagels got boiled for one minute on each side.

I then spread some grits over the baking sheets before laying the bagels out to be baked. It was supposed to be cornmeal, but I didn't have that and with my days at the grist mill at summer camp as reference, I decided grits were the next best thing. Finally, the bagels got baked for 10 minutes in the oven. 10 minutes, that's it! Much to my surprise, they not only came out looking like bagels but they are absolutely delicious!

Seriously, I cannot believe they came out anywhere near this good. I was expecting them to come out as misshapen clumps of semi-cooked dough that I would eat anyway because I would be too proud to admit defeat. But instead, I got to enjoy a bagel, diet coke and a little Bieber this morning (catching up on the Grammys). Fabulous way to start the day.