Bagels — c'est moi qui les ai faits

Walt has made bagels several times over the years with great success, but until this week I had never tried my hand at it. I found a recipe that seemed simple enough and adapted it to my taste and to the ingredients we had in the cellier.

The recipe I found (but which I've been unable to locate on the 'net this morning) called for making the bagels with high-gluten bread flour (wheat flour). I didn't have that. What I did have was about a cup (240 milliliters) of oat flour (farine d'avoine), the same amount of whole-grain rye flour (farine complète de seigle type 130), and of course plenty of all-purpose French wheat flour (farine de blé type 55).

Bagels are a bread that is made with yeast and some sugar, along with water and salt. Their distinctive characteristic is that the bagel dough is boiled after the bagels are shaped. Then they're baked in a hot oven. The resulting bread is tender but also chewy.

So my main modification to the recipe was using a mix of those three flours instead of a single kind. I also boiled the bagels longer than the 45 seconds the recipe called for. And that meant they didn't need to spend as much time in the oven. Here's the bagel-making method I came up with. Remember, in U.S. terms, "one cup" means 240 milliliters.

Oat-Rye-Wheat Bagels

Makes 8 bagels

1½ cups water
8 g yeast
40 g sugar
15 g salt
1 cup oat flour
1 cup whole-grain rye flour
2 cups all-purpose wheat flour
2 quarts water (for boiling)
1 egg white + sesame or poppy seeds (optional)

Mix yeast, sugar and warm water together and let stand 3 minutes.

Mix 3 flours with the salt in mixer bowl and add the yeast mixture. Mix with dough hook until combined. Add more flour as needed to make a stiff, not sticky dough. Knead for 5 to 10 minutes.

[Note: Instead of oat, rye, and wheat flours, you can use four cups of high-gluten bread flour.]

Place dough in a covered bowl and let rise for 60 to 90 minutes. After rising punch down and divide dough into 8 balls. Allow to rest for 4 minutes.

Bring 2 quarts of water to boil in a sauté pan.

With your thumb, make a hole in each ball of dough and pull open about 2 inches, making a bagel shape. Place the shaped bagels onto a cookie sheet and cover for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350ºF.

Lower heat under water for it to be simmering. Drop 4 bagels at a time into the water for about 4 minutes, turning each once. Drain and place on greased baking sheets.

Optionally, brush tops of bagels with beaten egg white and top with sesame seeds, poppy seeds, etc.

Bake for about 25 minutes. Bagels are done when they are golden brown and shiny.

Above, the bagels are baking in the oven. I thought the dough didn't rise very much before I cut it into pieces and formed the bagels, but you can see that the bagels puffed up quite a bit when they were boiled and then baked.