Baking Bagels

In the course of making bread from Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day, I stumbled upon their recipe for bagels.*

Rising balls of proto-bagels.

Bagels, I thought. If I could make bagels easily, that'd really be something!

Boiling the proto-bagels.

Yesterday I made the dough and today I tried it out.

Drying off.

As yummy as they were, they're not bagels. They're sort of like a crunchy English muffin. Yummy, but definitely not a bagel. Growing up in NY, I know what a bagel is supposed to be and I rather miss them.

Finished "bagels". You really do need to make those holes BIG!

So I broke out the Big Book O' Food (aka The New Best Recipe Book by Cook's Illustrated) and had a look at their bagel recipe. Hmm. High gluten flour and malt syrup and slow rising in the refrigerator. Hmmm.

Now I have a plan: I'm going to try the recipe as written in the Big Book and then I'll try it again in AB5M, using the high gluten flour and malt syrup and then I'll see how it goes. If it's just about as good using the simpler methods, I'll stick with that. If it's still nothing like a bagel, I may either stick to the Big Book method (good but labor intensive) or I'll...[Gasp!] continue to buy bagels.

Wish me luck!



* In case you're wondering where the heck I've been, I've been...sad. I'm working on it. It's hard to write or edit photos in this state.