Let's be frank. Most of us do not live in New York. Most of us probably wouldn't want to live in New York, save for one reason: the bagels.
Pretty much the rest of America is woefully underserved when it comes to bagels. Our neighborhood sources tend to be grocery stores or chains - or downright nonexistent. With some precious exceptions, the bagels we do get are doughy, pale, gigantic, bland or some bastardization that involves chocolate chips, Asiago cheese or (really!) French toast. (Rainbows? No. Just no.)
Here's the thing, though. You can make your own bagels, in your own regular ol' kitchen, and even if you're a beginner, the results will vastly surpass almost anything you're likely to buy.
No special skill or elaborate equipment is required to turn out bagels that are golden and crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside and absolutely impossible to resist. Can you boil a pot of water? Then you can do this. And with apologies to your favorite bagel shop, you've probably never had a bagel fresher than one you just pulled from your own oven.
Neither of us is a professional baker, but we do love bread. Motivated by the difficulty of finding a decent bagel within stumbling distance on weekend mornings, we both independently began tinkering with home bagelmaking, just for fun. Even if the results were less than Upper West Side quality, they could hardly be worse than (shudder) a bagel from the freezer aisle.
Then one day, on a lark, we decided to host a homemade bagel breakfast for our colleagues at the office, each bringing in our best.
The reaction? Amazement, disbelief. Why?
"There are so many bad bagels out there" that people assume making a good one "must require some sort of magic," said Bagel Uprising founder Chad Breckinridge, an FCC employee who turned his hobby into a 500-bagel-a-week gig at the Four Mile Run Farmers and Artisans Market in Alexandria.
In fact, no magic is required. You don't even need that famed New York tap water, whose mythical qualities have been laughably touted for far too long as the secret ingredient to the Big Apple's bagels.
"I don't think there's any good reason to be intimidated" by making bagels, said Jeffrey Hamelman, a certified master baker, instructor and director of King Arthur Flour's bakery in Norwich, Vt. "They might be among the easiest things to make, because they're a firm dough."
With its low ratio of water to flour, bagel dough generally is considered low-hydration. That makes it easier to handle, easier to shape and easier to roll without leaving your hands covered in the floury residue common with higher-hydration recipes for, say, pizza dough. But you don't want the dough to be too firm, or it's likely to tear during rolling, resulting in rounds that are scarred and pockmarked in a way that would make even the most forgiving baker grimace.
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The starting points
Though our colleagues practically inhaled the bagels we brought in for our breakfast, our inner perfectionists couldn't help noting that the early returns were a bit big, and not as dense and chewy as our ideal. Plus, there was no crackle on either of our crusts.
As soon as we started comparing notes, we realized that even bagel recipes from the most reputable sources can vary widely in ingredients and methodology.
Alex had begun his quest for bagel mastery with a Serious Eats recipe, which is itself an adaptation of a recipe from "Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads." Becky had used her tried-and-true Cook's Illustrated recipe.
The Serious Eats recipe can be completed, start to finish, in about three hours, including an hour-long rise. Who wouldn't be attracted by the idea of mixing flour at 9 a.m. on a lazy Saturday morning and noshing on a bagel brunch by noon?
The Cook's Illustrated recipe, on the other hand, requires two short bursts of bagelmaking punctuated by a 12-to-18-hour rise in the refrigerator. You can sleep in a bit longer before your bagel brunch, provided you're willing to do a bit of prep work the night before.
The Serious Eats recipe is a much wetter formulation, with 64 percent hydration and extra sugar to encourage the yeast to feast hungrily during its very short rise. But the flimsy dough can be tougher to shape. The Cook's recipe is an arid 48 percent formulation, and there's no rest for the dough before it's shaped and sent to slowly cold-ferment.
Another crucial distinction involved barley malt syrup, a molasses-like goo that gives bagels their signature nuttiness and tan. The Serious Eats recipe calls for the syrup to be added only to the pot of boiling water in which the risen bagels will be dunked; Cook's Illustrated uses it in place of sugar in the dough itself. We found it to be vitally important as a dough component, less so in the water.
Although both recipes can produce schmear-worthy rounds, we saw room for compromise. And after churning out many a bagel (approximately 130) in our research for this story, we've merged our approaches into what we think is a straightforward, streamlined path to excellent results, with plenty of room for your own tinkering.
But not too much tinkering.
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The do's and don'ts
- Thou shalt not use the wrong flour. You might be tempted to pull out the all-purpose most of us have in our pantries, but don't. Its protein content (generally 10 to 12 percent) is not as high as other, better options, such as bread or high-gluten formulations (about 12 to 14 percent). "The more protein means the chewier the bagel," Hamelman said.
A little science: There are two proteins in your flour, glutenin and gliadin. The gliadin, Hamelman said, lets your dough stretch, while the glutenin is what gives it elasticity so it snaps back. Add water, and the two come together to form gluten.
To play around with those characteristics, we tried different flours. The Cook's Illustrated method called for King Arthur's High-Gluten Flour (14.2 percent protein), which is available only by special order, but we saw no discernible difference when we swapped in the brand's bread flour (12.7 percent protein), which you can buy at most grocery stores. (Gold Medal's bread flour gave us a slightly slacker dough, which made sense given its 11.7 to 12.3 percent protein content.)
By the way, this is a thick, stiff dough. Your best bet is to make it in a stand mixer, which will get a good workout, so keep an eye on the machine to make sure it's not overheating or threatening to hop off the counter.
- Let your bagel dough rest. "I think it would be hard to refute that the flavor is better" when the shaped bagels are refrigerated overnight, Hamelman said. The long, slow rise means the yeast can work its fermentation magic on your dough, which will impart flavors without the shaped rounds expanding too much.
- Then give them a bath. You must boil your bagels. Do not skip this step, Hamelman said. After the overnight refrigeration, boiling helps wake up the yeast in the dough, which makes the bagel begin to puff. It also gelatinizes surface starches to help create shine and enhance crustiness. You can boil your bagels for as little as 30 seconds, which will ensure a dense, chewy ring. Leave them in the water longer for something airier. "It's going to grow in the water, then it will continue to grow in the oven," Hamelman said. A general rule: Boil until the bagels are about two-thirds as big as you want them to ultimately be.
- For baking, make it hot, hot, hot. We didn't reach bagel nirvana until we made one crucial addition to our recipe: a pizza stone. We'd achieved a completely acceptable crust in a 450-degree oven while baking the bagels on a baking sheet, but the stone took care of the pale area around the bagels' equator, meaning we had an evenly brown, crackly exterior - with the characteristic blisters we so wanted to see - that encased a chewy inside.
- Practice, and then practice some more. Do not be discouraged if it takes you forever to roll your first batch (been there!) or if your bagels turn out a bit lumpy and wrinkled. They'll taste great, and your family and friends will marvel at your endeavor and thank the heavens for all your experimentation. Each subsequent batch will get better. Trust us.
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