Very Good Bagels, Easy-ish Too

My bagel-making experiments began earlier this summer in, of all places, the modestly equipped kitchen of a rental cabin at Lake George. We had just tasted the first good summer tomatoes, found at a farm stand in Bolton Landing, and all at once, all I wanted to eat was a good, toasted bagel, smeared with cream cheese, topped with a beefy tomato slice, sprinkled with sea salt.

I’ve longed to find/adapt/create an easy or easy-ish bagel recipe, but past summers have escaped without more than the odd experiment. It was time to take a deep or deep-ish dive.

Having had success using the peasant bread dough to make many various bread forms, I hoped it might take to the bagel format, too, but I quickly learned it would not: the peasant bread dough is way too wet (high hydration*) and my first experiments yielded flat, dense disks, edible but not acceptable.

I’ll spare you all the details, but after many experiments, I’ve learned that the process of making bagels is a real departure from the one I’m so used to. Bagels require kneading, shaping, boiling, and egg washing. But they can, I think, be easy-ish. I find these to be just that, kind of fun to make, very tasty, and perfect for my ideal breakfast this time of year. Good enough for me. I hope you approve.

In sum I’ve learned:

• To get that characteristic chewiness—in other words, to ensure bagels don’t simply taste like bread shaped like bagels—the dough needs to be kneaded. After reading a Stella Park’s article, I decided to do this in the food processor, which takes 90 seconds.

• As always, a digitial scale is essential for consistent results, but it’s even more essential here—lower hydration* doughs are less forgiving. I never weigh the water for peasant bread recipes, but I do here, and I also weigh the salt, which, in this humidity, has been feeling lighter in the measuring spoons than usual.

• To prevent the shaped dough rings from turning into pancakes upon being boiled, the dough hydration* needs to be relatively low. In other words, the dough should be relatively stiff.

• If you have the time, an overnight rise in the fridge is best.

• To get that nice, golden sheen during the baking, an egg wash is essential. Commercial bakers often boil their bagels in a lye solution, which promotes browning and gives the bagel crust a crispness. As lye is something I am unwilling to experiment with—remember, I’ve embarked on a deep-ish dive—an egg wash is a fine substitute. It does not help with crispness, but it gives the bagels the look.

• An optional but nice ingredients to use in your homemade bagels is barley malt syrup, which can be ordered online or found in specialty shops. Stella Parks says that in addition to providing flavor, barley malt syrup promotes “a more delicate texture in the crust, one that’s chewy and crisp rather than crunchy and hard.” I’ve had a jar on hand since reading her article, and I’ve been happy with the texture of my homemade bagels as a result, but know that you can create very good bagels at home without it. I recently learned that the chef, David Wurth, of Cross Roads in Hillsdale, who makes exceptional bagels, uses maple syrup in his boiling solution, so if you don’t feel like hunting down barley malt syrup, you don’t have to.

* Hydration is not something I ever talk about here or in my book, because typically I find the concept confuses and intimidates people rather than helps. Hydration is the percentage of liquid in a dough. I mention it today only because I think the most significant difference—more than kneading, boiling, shaping—between bagels and the peasant bread (and so many breads I love) is the hydration. Bagels are low hydration; peasant bread is high. Bagels are not light and airy; they are chewy and dense. These bagels are 69% hydration (calculated by dividing the weight of the water by the weight of the flour), whereas the peasant bread dough is about 94% hydration. 

Here’s a play-by-play: Gather your ingredients and equipment. A digital scale and a food processor make this recipe nearly foolproof:

Whisk together the water and barley malt syrup:

Add the liquid ingredients to the flour, salt, and instant yeast, and knead for 90 seconds:

The dough will be warm and sticky:

Use greased hands to transfer it to a bowl. Coat it with a little bit of olive or grapeseed oil. On the left: just-mixed dough. On the right: dough after a night in the fridge.

You all have one of these, right?

After 12 hours (or more or less) in the fridge, turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface.

Portion the dough into 12 pieces:

Ball them up:

Shape them into rings, by using your thumb to poke a hole in the center of the round, then both hands to stretch the dough out and under—don’t afraid to be aggressive. Video guidance here.

Prepare the water bath by boiling water with barley malt syrup:

Get ready to boil:

Boil 30 seconds a side:

Transfer boiled bagels to a tea towel-lined sheet pan.

Brush bagels with an egg wash:

Dip in desired seasonings:

Bake until golden.



Invite some friends over for brunch:

Find yourself some good tomatoes; enter summer-morning breakfast nirvana.

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