When I caught COVID, quarantined at home with nothing to do and no good bagel delivery options, I found myself asking “hey I wonder how hard it is to make bagels?”
It’s really not hard.
I found this recipe for Montreal-style bagels from King Arthur, which has a few benefits.
- It uses honey instead of lye. If you have a mishap with lye, you go to the ER. If you have a mishap with honey, you get sticky.
- I’m not trying to immitate or compete with the excellent bagels I can pick up from Bagels Etc., DC’s finest bagelry. It’s better to do something slightly different and try to make that really good.
Mostly this all sounds far more impressive than the amount of work that actually goes into it.
Notes
- Most everything bagel seasoning is pretty light on garlic and salt. Add more of both.
- You really do want a pizza stone. Without it, the bottoms burn. With it, the bagels are evenly cooked on all sides.
- Get plastic bread bags to store (after they’ve cooled off). The timing matters here. If you put a warm, steaming bagel in plastic, it will get soggy overnight. Once it’s try, it keeps it from losing more moisture and going stale.
- The right way to form a bagel is to roll it into a log and fuse the edges together, but it’s so much easier to roll it into a flat-ish ball and poke a hole through the middle.*
* Look, at long as you aren’t baking round unboiled bread and trying to pass that nonsense off as a bagel, everything is fine.
Obviously serve with a heavy schmear cream cheese, lox, onion, tomato.