After a few days at home over the holidays I started to go into bagel withdrawal.  At this point, I’ve lived in New York long enough that midwestern supermarket bagels just don’t cut it.  Also, there is very little to do at my parents’ Appalachian Ohio farmstead in the winter: the cold temperatures keep me indoors while there’s no tv or cell service and only the crappiest of Internet connections.

Therefore, I had both the time and motivation to make my first foray into bagel-making.  I had actually seen this done once before four years ago when I briefly worked at a kitchen in an eco-lodge in Belize (what I was doing there, and why they were making bagels in Belize are both questions for another time).

Anyways, I asked google “how to make bagels” and found a basic wheat bagel recipe on this page, which we followed pretty much to the letter as we made the dough, let it rise, and then divided it into eighteen balls.

To shape the bagel, you roll the dough ball into six-inch ropes, then form into rings, pressing the ends together tightly while still maintaining ring uniformity.  We didn’t do an amazing job at this.

The next step is to boil the rings, briefly, five at a time, for a few minutes.  Once the bagels start floating, you turn them over and boil for one more minute, at which point you remove them from the water with a slotted spoon.

Next, we dipped the bagels in a mixture of salt and poppy seeds, and then baked at 375 for about 25 minutes.

All four of us (my mom, dad, Anthony, and I) agreed that the end product tasted amazing fresh out of the oven. 

The appearance, however, was a different story. Some of them looked ok:

Others, less so:

While the four of us managed to snarf down a bunch of these guys while they were still warm, the recipe made 18 small bagels, so we had lots of leftovers. They tasted ok the next morning, but were dried out and gross by day #3.  Lesson: make bagels in smaller batches or freeze half.

Overall, I would characterize the bagel-making experiment as a success.  They weren’t that hard to make, as long as we didn’t get overly concerned with how they looked, and definitely satisfied my bagel craving.  

However, now that I’m back in Brooklyn, I’ll stick with buying them fresh from the coffee shop below my apartment.