Bagels!
4 min readApr 30, 2020
I’ve been wanting to try making bagels for a while. Most of the recipes I found required diastatic malt or barley syrup, which I don’t have. Instead, beer!
I cobbled this together from a variety of sources, including Basics with Babish’s bagel recipe, Binging with Babish’s bagel sandwich recipe, Joshua Weissmann, and a Bon Appetit video about Philly bagels. This recipe makes 12ish bagels.
Ingredients:
Dough:
- 585g AP flour
- 65g Wheat bread flour (you could just use 650g AP)
- 350g water
- 10g yeast
- 10g salt
- 25g sugar
Resting:
- A few tbsp panko bread crumbs
Boil:
- 1 bottle Amber Lager (12 oz)
- ~1.5 gallons of water
- ~3 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 cup of sugar
Bake
- Badia Everything Bagel Seasoning
- 1/2 cup of water used to boil bagels in bottom of pan
Equipment
- Stand mixer, dough hook, bowl
- A couple of other containers with lids for proofing and fermenting
- Wire baking rack, sheet pan
- Large pot for boiling water
- Spider
- Scale
- Spoon for stirring water
Instructions
- Mix 225g AP flour and 25g of wheat bread flour, all water, and yeast, and let autolyse for ~2 hours
- Add the rest of the flour (400g), salt (10g), and sugar (25g) into the bowl of a stand mixer along with the autolysed mixture, and mix on low for 20 minutes
- Put dough in fridge overnight. (Alternatively, wait until the bagels are formed to do this)
- Let dough warm up and rise for about an hour or so after coming out of the fridge (or after kneading, if you didn’t fridge them yet).
- Cut dough into 12 roughly equal pieces and shape into balls on an unfloured surface. I’s important that the dough sticks to the surface, so that the gluten is stretched as much as possible. Longer gluten strands equals more chewiness!
- Let the dough balls rest for about 15 minutes to let the gluten relax a little bit. If you start rolling them out and find they aren’t cooperating, wait a little while longer and try again.
- Roll out each ball into a flat circle, and roll the circle up like a sleeping bag, pulling the dough out a little bit each time you roll it a little further.
- Roll the resulting rope of dough out until it is about 8 inches long, and then twist it by moving your hands in opposite directions and rolling the dough along the counter top. The Babish video has a good demonstration of this:
- Grab one end of the now twisted rope of dough and wrap it around your knuckles, joining it with the other end. Roll the now-joined ends a little to get them to stick together.
- Line a baking sheet with panko bread crumbs (corn meal works too, I just didn’t have any), and place the now-formed bagels on it. Cover with a damp kitchen towel, and let them sit for an hour to proof (a good place for this is in a turned-off oven with the oven light on as a heat source).
- After letting bagels sit for an hour, either stash them in the fridge over night if you haven’t already, or get ready to boil.
- Boil one and a half gallons of water and one bottle of amber lager (I used Wolverine State, but the quality of the beer doesn’t really matter). Add in 3 tbsp of baking soda and 1/4 cup of sugar. I’m not sure how important these ingredient are, but they’re standing in for barley syrup.
- Once the water is near boiling, set your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Drop the bagels into the liquid, making sure they float. If they don’t, you didn’t get enough yeast development. Also, don’t crowd these too much, as they’ll stick to each other and the side of the pot. Ask me how I know.
- Boil bagels on each side for about a minute
- Remove the bagels from the pot and put them on a wire rack, and put the wire rack onto a baking sheet. If you would like to add seasoning, do so now. I used Badia’s everything bagel seasoning because it’s what we could find at the store.
- Pour a 1/2 cup of the boiling liquid from the pot into bottom of pan, and place the bagels into the oven for 10ish minutes, flip, and bake for at least 10 more minutes. The timing here may vary depending on your dough.
- Pull them out of the oven, let cool, and enjoy!
P.S. the breadcrumbs/seasoning/boiling liquid leave a tasty crust in the bottom of the pan