Bagels

And it's Monday again...*sigh*...the weekends definitely goes by way too fast!!  I had a fun filled weekend, full of baking and trying out new recipes.  Remember my breast cancer sugar cookies?  I had a sell out over the weekend and had to bake up a few more batches.  I also had developed a vegan banana nut oatmeal cookie that's reduced in sugar (more on these cookies on the next post!) that I had baked up over the weekend.  However, one of the exciting parts of this weekend was finally being able to try my hand at making bagels!  It has never really occurred to me to make my own bagels until now.  I've been sucked into the whole bread baking thing and it's actually a lot of fun! And the amount of work that goes into baking bread just makes the end product that much more special.  Let me tell you, there's a lot of hard work and time that goes into bread making! But once you've made a successful batch, it's addicting...you'll want to keep baking up more bread and different kinds of yeast breads!  Well, I've got that itch and thought bagels might be a fun alternative to my usual French bread!  Plus, it's always fun for me to try different products and see the results.

So, my first time making bagels and what I realized was I should have kneaded the dough more.  The recipe that I followed didn't really give clear directions about kneading, but the one thing I learned after making these is: I've got to knead the dough until I get something more smooth than these!  This is a picture of the bagels after I shaped them and is in the process of a quick rise before I put it into the refridgerator for the night!

These bagels have already been dipped into boiling water for about a minute on each side.  I decided to make garlic bagels, sesame bagels and plain.  After the dip into boiling water, I set the bagels onto corn meal and sprinkled my flavors on.  However, next time, I decided I will give the bagels an egg white wash before sprinkling on the flavors (gives the bagels a nicer color!).

I was pretty happy with these bagels!  It definitely took longer to bake than what the original recipe said.  It also wasn't getting any color, so towards the end of the bake time, once I realized it wasn't coloring enough, I gave it a quick egg wash (which I will do beforehand next time!) and it produced these bagels, which had just enough color. So, a few things learned from this first baking session with bagels.  I plan on making another batch over this weekend, along with the changes, and see how they turn out!  These actually tasted like bagels and had a nice crunch with a doughy middle.  I did notice that my leftovers (that I had put into a ziplock baggie) lost the crisp and tasted more stale.  I'm not sure if it was because of the kneading (or lack of) that caused a tougher bagel...but we'll see the next time I make these!  Overall, they were delicious!