Who knew that making bagels was so easy?

For months I’ve been baking all of our bread:  baguettes, whole wheat loaves, hamburger buns, flatbread…  Bagels, though, are a mystery.  Isn’t there an obscure ingredient that gives store-bought bagels their distinctive flavour and texture?  Haven’t I heard something about boiling bagels?  Surely that can’t be true.  Who boils any kind of bread dough?

Today I googled a recipe and took the plunge.  So did the bagels.  Get it?  Plunge?  As in, into water?  Okay.  Ignore me – I’m getting carried away.  I admit I felt a little giddy when these turned out delicious on the very first try.

It turns out bagels are easy to make.  You mix up the dough – much like bread dough, only without the oil – and you let it rise.  The mystery of bagels, I guess, is in the boil.  Using a slotted spoon I dropped each circle of dough into vigorously boiling water – just for a minute or two – and then I baked them on high heat (450 degrees F).  The result?  Eight beautiful bagels.

Here’s the recipe I used:  New York-Style Bagels

NOTE:  Next time I will raise the oven rack so that the bottoms don’t get so dark.  And my husband told me, in no uncertain terms “Never make those salty ones again.” (I bought some chunky sea salt, and, never having used it before, went a little crazy with it as a topping.  Way too much.  Very salty.  Very much like eating a spoonful of salt with each bite.  Yuk.)

NOTE #2:  You may wonder about the Do Not Eat sign.  Best birthday present ever.  I was constantly stressing about teenagers (and occasionally husbands) causing food to disappear from the kitchen so that when meal time came, key ingredients would be gone.  Then my thoughtful spouse gave me a bunch of these homemade Do Not Eat signs for my birthday.  I absolutely love them and I use them all the time.