Bagels
I’ve never made bagels before but we eat lots of them so I decided that today was a day to try something new. I used a recipe by Dan Lepard from his Short and Sweet recipe book. He has a similar recipe which can be found on the Guardian website.
First strong white flour, salt, sugar, fast-acting dried yeast, white wine vinegar and water were put in a large mixing bowl.
They were brought together by hand to form a rough dough.
The dough was then kneaded for 10 seconds to make a smoother texture; at this point the gluten has not really started working and the dough is not at all stretchy which I have tried to show in the picture above. The dough was placed back in the bowl and covered for 20 minutes.
After 20 minutes the dough is kneaded for a further 10 seconds. It is now starting to get more elastic but is still not very stretchy. After the kneading the dough is put back in the bowl and left for another 20 minutes.
The dough is once again kneaded for 10 seconds. It is now more elastic and stretch more thinly before breaking. I then repeated the process once more.
You can see after this final knead the dough stretches much more thinly and is almost transparent. After kneading again for 10 seconds the dough is put back in the bowl but this time it is left for an hour.
It is quite cold in our house and so, to encourage the dough to rise (although it can be left to rise very slowly, improving the flavour – I just didn’t have the time) I warmed my wheat bag in the microwave and put it on top of the bowl lid!
At the end of the hour the dough was divided into 12 equal pieces which were formed into balls and left to rise, covered with cling film, for another 20 minutes.
At this point the bagels need shaping – there are two ways to do this. The easy way to do this is to poke a hole in the middle of the bagel with your finger and just stretch it out a bit. I made 6 of my bagels like this. The other 6 I made using the more traditional method described below.
First I flattened each ball with the palm of my hand to make a thin disc.
Then I rolled each disc into a tight sausage.
This sausage was rolled further with the palms of my hands (like making a Play Dough worm!) to make a sausage of dough about 15 cm long. At this point it is best for the ends to be thinner than the middle.
The two thin ends are then brought together, ideally with one on top of the other rather than being side by side, and poking 2 or 3 fingers into the hole the bagel is rolled a little to stick the join together. The process is shown really clearly on this You Tube video.
Whilst the oven is heating the bagels and boiled briefly in water – this gives them their classic chewy texture.
They are then placed on greased baking sheet. They can be either left plain, sprinkled with salt or seeds. I chose to sprinkle rock salt on them as this is all I had!
They are baked until they are golden brown.
The two pictures above show the difference in the finished bagels between the easy and traditional methods of shaping the bagels – I think I prefer the first one…
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