Cooking adventure #1: Bagels

I, as a rule, generally don’t cook. For one thing, I am fairly bad at it. I once managed to burn Rice A Roni. I guess my low heat was higher than Rice A Roni’s low heat and I got some blackened rice. I do, however, like to try.

One of my favorite things is authentic tasting bagels. Most of the donut shaped bread things you buy at the grocery store aren’t really bagels. They’re just not. So when I read Hilary had made some bagels, I thought I would try it, too.

I had tried to make some bagels before and they didn’t turn out so well.

That is the picture before they were baked. As you can see, they are a little bit flat. After they were baked, they looked like cookies or something. They tasted good but oh they were flat– like a deflated balloon.

So this time, I used a different recipe that can be found here. There are even videos to show you how to knead and shape the things.

So away I went. First, you need a really big bowl because three cups of water and up to seven cups of flour makes a lot of dough. My first bowl was too small. The bowl I let the dough rise in was too small. I also managed to flour my entire house.

No really. Look at those pants. It looks like I peed flour all over myself.

I attempted to buy poppy seeds but no stores in tiny town carry poppy seeds. They didn’t even have the back up of sesame seeds so I ended up making regular plain non embellished bagels.

I think I didn’t let them boil long enough because they didn’t have the contrast between the outside crunchiness and the inside chewiness. But they were tasty. They tasted fresh. Fresh is good and they went well with a shmear.

I can’t complain.

I will say that this is an all morning or all afternoon endeavor. You have to let the dough rise for an hour. There’s also 10 minutes of resting here. Five minutes resting there. The boiling process takes a bit. Then they bake in the oven for about thirty minutes. Like I said, a whole afternoon.

But YUMMY! It just might be worth it.