Bagels 1.0

I don’t know what it is that led somebody to poke a hole in a perfectly good roll, boil it, then bake it … but they’re tasty, I’m told, despite the labor involved. I’m sure that our kitchen will recover from the spatters and splashes, and I’m sure that I’m sucker enough to try it again.

I started with the basic olive bread recipe (see “What Goes Into Bread”), but instead of putting diced onions I went with onion powder, and I backed off on the seeds a bit, so that the dough would be a bit more bread & a bit less … “stuff.” From there, it was a matter of forming things into little doughnut-esque things and letting them rise … and then beginning the insanity.

After you’ve got enough of a rise out of them, you boil each bagel (I worked in batches of 4) for 5 minutes, with at least one “turn-over” in that period. I used the handle of a wooden spoon along with a large “spider” (one of those things you use to fish stuff out of the deep-fry). After their requisite 5 minutes of boiling, you place them onto an oiled pan in the oven at 500°F. The oil is important, ladies and gentlemen. I used canola spray … starting with the second batch of 4, of course, ’cause … well, just ’cause I wasn’t really thinking about it.

After they go into the oven, they’ve got to bake for about 15 minutes. You could go 20 – and I did, on a few – but 15 seemed to do the trick for me, as I wanted them to be a bit soft. I figured that you can always toast them, but you can’t un-cook them, so it was better to go a little underdone. I’m sure that nobody’s out there complaining.

But wait. Did you see it, friends? Did you see the fatal flaw in this whole mess? Let me hint at a bit more: you boil for 5 minutes; you bake for 15 minutes. What happens to the third batch of bagels that you threw into the boiling water? Oh, you mean, you’re going to reach into the (very steamy) oven, pull out a tray of partially baked bagels, skooch them over so that you can fit four more on there, and then keep on doing the same thing for the next, oh, hour or so? And what, pray tell, happens when you end up with four batches going, all underdone, and another batch coming off of the boil? Because unless you’ve got an awesome oven, one rack is going to cook differently then the other, and with all the opening and closing, there’s no chance you’re going to get things to cook according to some mathematically-possible scheme. (I did the math … and then did the thinking to determine why the math sucked).

Suffice it to say that I need a larger oven & to do a bit of pre-planning on this next time. I believe that this is why some recipes say to dunk your bagels in cold water after you’ve boiled them. You could probably float them all in the cool water bath & then load them into the oven all at one time, if you were smart. Or if you thought about it. Or if you planned to try this more than once.

Next time. Next time, it will be different.

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