Hi guys I'm Laura Vitale, on this episode of Laura in the Kitchen, I want to show you
how I make my bagels.
Now I've had a lot of people request these over the years, I think especially because
I've done pretzels and croissants, I guess this was like the next - you know, the only
natural way to go is to show you how to make bagels.
And I'm also really thrilled to share this with you because if you live in a part of
the world where you've never had a bagel, or you've seen them on TV or whatever, now
you can make them from scratch.
I know in Italy, we don't have bagels but I love them and I ope that you enjoy my recipe
as well.
The ingredients that you'll need to make the bagels are very, very few.
To make the dough, all you need is some bread flour, sugar, salt, warm water, and you'll
need additional sugar and some active dry yeast.
Now, my water is nice and warm at about 110 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit, I'm going to add
my little bit of yeast and my sugar and I'm just going to let that sit aside until it
becomes all foamy and the yeast activates, but I also wanted to just talk to you a little
bit about bread flour because I know I'm going to get a lot of questions about whether or
not you can substitute all purpose flour, and you can, you can use all purpose flour
but what you have to remember is that bread flour has a higher content of gluten and therefore
it's going to provide that really chewy texture that bagels are known for.
So, for me, personally bread flour is interchangeable, I mean you can do all purpose flour or bread
flour, but I do lean more on the bread flour because I just really enjoy that chewy bagel
texture.
So if you want that classic texture, you need to use bread flour, if it doesn't matter to
you, you can use either one.
So I hope that helps.
Okay, I'm just going to add these to my standing mixer and I'm just going to wait until my
yeast is activated.
As you can see the yeast has got nice and foamy, that's a good sign!
Good things are going to happen!
And now I'm just going to add my water, my yeast and sugar mixture to my bowl.
Now, before I turn this on - because it's going to get loud - you need to mix this for
about 8 minutes, you need to make sure that that gluten is developed.
If you don't have a standing mixer and you do it by hand, you're most likely going to
have to knead it for about twenty five minutes to achieve the same result, so you can do
it by hand, it's just going to take a whole lot longer than 8 minutes, so keep that in
mind.
I'm going to let this go for a while and then I'll show you what it looks like when it's
done and I also just oiled the same bowl that I had the flour in with some vegetable oil
so that it's ready for it, when it is ready to go in.
Perfect!
So, if you have a standing mixer like mine, just keep it in the number 2 the entire 8
minutes, and it works out perfect every single time.
I love this dough it really is wonderful, fool proof, once you.
Ay.
Once you make it once and you work with it once, you'll understand, like you can make
different sizes of bagels, it's just wonderful.
I don't know if you can tell, but you see how it's leaving marks behind?
You see it's tacky?
That's really important, you don't want your dough to be really dry, you want it to be
quite tacky.
Otherwise it won't work, otherwise when you're trying to roll your bagels, it just, trust
me, it just won't work so make sure it's nice and tacky and I just like to take whatever
leftover oil and just tape it around the top and the sides.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to cover this with some plastic wrap and I need to
put it somewhere to rise, you don't wan this to rise until it's doubled because if it rises
until it's doubled, the dough becomes too soft to work with so you want it until it's
about one and a half times the size that it is now, so this usually takes about an hour
and ten minutes or so, I'm going to do that and then we'll start shaping them!
My dough looks perfect.
This is what you want it to look like.
Now, before I handle it, you want to get a large pot, I like to use my big dutch oven
for this, I add some water to it and I add some honey.
Now what I've done, this was already warm, so what I need to do now is bring this up
to a boil, and I also have my oven pre-heated to 425 F, and you want to place one of your
oven racks in the upper two thirds of your oven because if you bake these at the very
lowest - bottom rack, the bottoms will burn, middle rack, I still feel like the bottom
gets a little bit dark, but if you place this on the upper two thirds rack of the oven then
they just get beautiful, beautiful color.
And I've got a large baking sheet with some parchment paper, you might want to do two
baking sheets, but I'm doing 8 bagels to day out of this mixture so it's going to work
out perfectly.
Now you'll notice there's no flour anywhere near me and that's because you need your dough
to be quite tacky when you go ahead and roll these, and you don't want to add any - if
you can help it - you don't want to add flour to this, that's all I'm saying.
So, what I also have here is a clean kitchen towel that's been dampened and now out of
this I am going to get 8 bagels, you can get a scale out if you want to and measure them
to make sure they're perfect, but if you and I know each other well, which I like to think
we do, then you know that I am not about that life, haha, I don't really mind if some are
bigger than others.
To me, that's kind of the beauty of home cooking is to just, I don't like that feeling of having
everything being so perfect and looking like a machine did it because that's not how I
operate in my real life, so I don't want to operate that way just on camera.
I like things to be homemade and care free and easy.
So now you need to shape these, which is very easy but I'm going to show you, you take your
piece of dough, you kind of roll it like this, you can kind of cup it with your hand, then
on a clean work surface, you take it and you roll and roll and roll and roll.
Hear that?
You're going to have no seam.
So you just need to roll that between the palm of your hand.
If you look up close, my thumb and my pinky keep it in it's shape.
See how my thumb and my pinky never ever move?
I mean, I don't spread them out or anything, that keeps the shape, you see that?
That is looking perfect, if it has just a little bit of a seam underneath, that's fine
but what you don't want is to have it break apart so this is just about where I want it
and because we didn't add any flour, it's not rolling around all over the place.
So, I've got one down, I'm going to place it on my baking sheet.
And as I place them on there I'm going to just get my clean kitchen towel and just cover
it.
And I'm just going to continue to roll the rest.
So now that you have these all rolled out, you need to form them, you need to shape them
into bagels, and here's how you do it you take your index - you take your two index
fingers, or as my nonna would call them my 'I told you so' fingers!
You take your one finger, you poke it into the center to make a hole, like that, and
then you stretch it, you fit your other finger in there and then you roll, and I count to
about fifteen, and that should be perfect, and then what you do is you place it down
on your baking sheet and then you just, you give it a little flat, you know you just kind
of flatten it a little with the palm of your hand.
And I'm going to continue to do this to all of them, I'm going to cover them, I'm going
to keep them covered with my damp kitchen towel and I'm going to keep it that way until
my water is up to a rolling boil, so probably another ten minutes or so, of them resting
and then we are in business.
My water and honey mixture is to a boil, I'm going to lower this now to about medium-low
I want it to be about a simmer, not a rolling boil.
These have only been resting for several minutes, and all I'm going to do now, and this is what
I want you to keep in mind, I'm going to do 4 at a time and I like to put them in there
top side up and leave them in there for one minute, then flip them, let them cook for
one minute on the other side so a total of two minutes per batch and then I'm going to
put them back onto the same baking sheet that's been lined with parchment paper, so I'm just
going to keep an eye on these and I'll show you what they look like when they come out.
These are ready, I've just let them sit here for a few minutes so that the water kind of
absorbs, also when I put them back onto my baking sheet I flipped them so that they're
top side up, if you will, because they just look better.
Now what I'm going to do, what I have here is an egg white that I've beaten with a little
bit of water to make an egg white wash, and I just like to brush the tops with this, one
because it gives you beautiful color, but two, because if you're going to use any toppings,
like I'm going to do a couple with some poppy seeds and a couple using some sesame seeds,
you need to make sure that they stick, really.
So this adds kind of like a layer of edible glue, if you will, for my toppings.
If you want to add onion flakes or garlic flakes to this, my suggestion would be to
wait until these are halfway cooked through because they do tend to burn if you do put
them on for the full twenty minutes of baking, I've tried and they just burn but the poppy
seeds and the sesame seeds don't.
So, I'm going to do two with sesame seeds, because sesame seed bagels are my favorite.
So I'm going to do two with those, and then I'm going to do two with poppy seeds because
Joe loves poppy seed bagels because they're delicious and I like variety in my life.
And then all I need to do is pop these into he oven for twenty minutes and I like to make
sure to rotate the baking sheet halfway through to ensure even baking and even coloring, all
that fun stuff.
And then I'm going to let them cool, pretty much completely on a wire rack and I'll show
you what they look like when they're done!
My bagels were in the oven for right around twenty minutes, I have let them cool completely
on my wire rack, and I just can't help but beam because of how beautiful they look.
Obviously, you want to split them open, you want to toast them, you want to smear them
with whatever your heart desires, but I did cut one open so that you can see how dense
and beautiful they look.
Had to do it!
They're so chewy.
They're got that classic like, sheen and there's such a pull with these when it comes to the
chewy-ness, I don't know if I can really describe it, you just have to try them, they're not
that difficult to make, they don't take hours and hours of rising, very easy technique,
you know makes for an amazing bagel that I know you're going to love.
Go to LauraintheKitchen.com to get the written recipe, I'm about to go toast this up and
put some cream cheese on it.
I'll see you next time!
Bye!