Me Vs. the Dough Wad

I was so proud of myself for completing the recipe before the deadline and then I totally forgot to blog about my bagels.

Further proof I should not be in this club.

For no other reason than pure stubbornness, I insisted on using my fresh ground whole wheat flour for this recipe, because I'm all hippy like that. I did have gluten on hand, so I added in two tablespoons per every four cups of flour. This worked well, I guess, except that I had to add a lot more water to the dough to get it to do up right. And it took me awhile to figure that out.

Plus, I doubled the recipe, which means I was wrestling a good ten pounds of dough.

You can imagine the angst.

I was pretty sure my handy-dandy Electrolux could handle "the toughest dough out there," but when I doubled that recipe, I could swear I heard my mixer wheeze at me, "Really?"

So I yanked the dough wad out and threw it on the table, where I proceeded to push it around for about two minutes. I got frustrated, threw it back in the mixer, and reached for my dough hook. Then we did another round at the table. Finally, I added more water, used the dough hook again, kneaded by hand some more and Voila! We reached the right temperature!

I will never, no, never pass the window pane test. That test is dead to me.

The rolls rose up nicely, they retarded well, etc. I had a hard time getting them to look nice and smooth when we rolled them up into bagels. My friend in culinary school told me it was because I used the whole wheat flour.

And yet I persist in my stubbornness.

We've enjoyed these so much, I forgot to take an "after" shot. So all of my photos are of dough balls, which you've seen before. I'll admit, these aren't very soft bagels. They're delicious, tasted great right out of the oven. But they're sort of a pain to cut in half. Which means I've been making lots of cream cheese dips so I don't have to cut the bagels for the kids.

At least I don't have to knead the cream cheese. My mixer handles that stuff juuuuuust fine.