Bagels, finally.

Well, I made my bagels two weekends ago. I started the process on Friday without much thought. Surely finding high-gluten flour and malt powder would be a piece of cake. Not so much. I spent about 3 hours on the phone calling just about every natural and/or organic food store, grocery store, bakery, and bagel shop in the metro area looking for high gluten flour. No luck! Found out that the bagels stores by me (Einst@ins and P@nera) don't make their bagels from scratch. Rather, they are shipped in frozen and baked in the store. So there was no hitting up "my local bagel shop" for any flour. There were some baking suppliers that sold the flour in 50-100 lb. bags. Yeah, not going to make that many bagels. What to do? I did finally find a store that sold barley syrup and some Vital Wheat Gluten. The gluten was $4.00 for a box, but the barley syrup was $7 for a bottle. I really couldn't justify buying the whole bottle of the syrup for just 1 teaspoon when honey would be a sufficient substitute.

After being mentally and financially o.k. with these substitutions, I made the dough as directed and added 1 teaspoon of gluten for every 1 cup of flour and instead of the malt syrup I used a tablespoon of honey. As I was kneading (by hand) I couldn't get the dough to do the elusive "window pane test," and I did have to add a few drops of water to get it to the right consistency. Not sure if that's from the gluten I put in it or not or just a lack of kneading skillz.

Because we were having 18 people in the house for Thanksgiving, I decided to make 24 of the smaller bagels. I made the bagels by poking a hole in the ball and widening the hole with my thumb. The "float test" was fun. I found it very suspenseful. Would my little bagels I had worked so hard on float or sink directly to the bottom? I held my breath and dropped one bagel slowly into the water and it immediately floated like a pool floatie. I did a little sigh of relief and kinda felt like a proud parent! I put the bagels on a baking sheet with some parchment paper and kept them in the fridge until the next day.



Saturday started with me preheating my oven to 500. Sure enough, the smoke alarm went off three times (thankfully I waited until everyone was up). What is it with us gals and our dirty ovens? (That reminds me I was going to put my oven on "self clean" today). Annnywaayy, I dropped the little bagels into my boiling water and boiled them for about a minute a side.
I made some with sesame seeds and salt, some with some dried minced onion, and some were plain. I forgot to lower the oven to 450 after I rotated them, but oh well. Don't know what the difference that would have made. After baking the plain ones, I brushed some with some melted butter and sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on them while they were still hot. Didn't want the sugar to burn in my 3 alarm oven.

I ended up freezing them and setting them out on the counter the night before Thanksgiving to thaw. Thanksgiving morning, we had some yummy bagels to stretch our stomachs until our big meal later on in the day. I thought they were really good and they seemed to please the crowd. Next time I will make more of the cinnamon and sugar ones as those went over well. I will definitely make these again. Maybe by then I will have found me some high gluten flour! Even though the gluten additive and the honey worked really well.