Homemade everything bagels

I’m very happy to write about the first time I ever made bagels! It was a super fun experience and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes baking. My brother Brandon (the better chef between the two of us) joined me on this challenge. To prepare, we spent an hour or so watching and studying various videos featuring Fairmount and Saint-Viateur as well as the bread-making episode of the Great Canadian Baking Show. We actually ended up using the recipe from the Great Canadian Baking Show, which you can find here.

This was actually the first time I ever made bread, so I’m very glad Brandon was around to share his expertise. For example, I had no idea that you wanted the dough to bounce back when you slap it. This is what our dough looked like before we proofed it.

Shaping the bagels was a bit more challenging than either of us had expected. The pieces of dough kept trying to snap back into balls while we were rolling them out into ropes. We actually shaped our dough twice because we weren’t quite happy with how they looked the first time.

After shaping, we boiled them in honey water for 3 minutes (1.5 minutes each side). At this stage, the kitchen smelled great.

Immediately after boiling, we covered the bagels in seeds by dunking them in a dish of seeds. Handling the bagels after they came out of the water was obviously difficult because they were so hot, so I would suggest letting them cool a little bit before doing this. The recipe suggested we place the bagels on a cooling rack and sprinkle them with seeds, but we wanted maximum seed coverage so we felt that dunking them was the way to go.

Then we put them in the oven! In a hilarious mishap, we thought the oven was in Celsius and not Fahrenheit (we were at our parents’ house!), so we accidentally set the oven to the wrong temperature and just kept the bagels warm for about 15 minutes before we realized our mistake.

Here’s what they looked like when they eventually came out fully baked though.

We started to eat some immediately. The freshness of it all made me wonder why I’ve never made bread before this moment.

We managed to get a crisp crust on the outside and it was soft and chewy on the inside. The bagel was quite sweet. I think the fact that it was so fresh and hot out of the oven (and also that I made it) might be biasing my opinion, but it tasted really legit.

After a day, I was actually able to slice my bagels with a butter knife and the texture was still soft and chewy. I’m super confused as to how my bagels were still so moist because bagels usually get stale pretty fast. I actually made a second batch a few days later to further test the longevity of these bagels. Overall, this was really fun and delicious and I can see myself baking bagels on a regular basis.