Bagels!

I spent most of Saturday morning in the kitchen (one of my favorite places to be!).  I wanted to make some kind of bread product to put in the freezer to have on hand for snacks throughout the next couple of weeks.  Since it's been awhile since I made bagels (and I think I've only made them once anyway...) I decided to try my hand at them again.  I also wanted to use the flax seeds that I bought some time ago at Whole Foods.  I like the taste and look of flax seeds in bread, but as the rest of the family doesn't I can't just put them in our bread.  I had these seeds from when I had made myself some seed rolls (also for the freezer).  

I didn't have a recipe that specifically called for flax seeds, but who cares?  :-)  I found a bagel recipe in one of our cook books that called for dehydrated onion, and to that I also added the seeds.  This recipe was more related to a simple French bread recipe than a sweet bread: no egg, sugar, or milk, and only a little bit of oil in the dough.

After mixing everything up and kneading it about a minute, you let the dough rest for 10 minutes underneath a towel.

Then you knead the dough some more before letting it rise 1-1/2 hours (Juli was with me part of the time, making stromboli for dinner on Sunday night).

Okay, your dough has risen now!  The next step is to form 12 equal balls of dough from the one big mass (I used a scale)....

... and form them into the bagel shape by pushing your finger through the center of the ball and rounding out the tube.

The trademark of a baked item being a bagel is that you boil the raw dough before baking it.  It's not intended to fully cook the dough, like when you fry doughnuts, but it gives the finished product that chewy texture for which bagels are known.

 

Next you put them on your pans....

 

... then stick them in the oven.  I tried to take a picture of them baking, but it was impossible to get an understandable picture of them through the closed oven door.  I tried; believe me, you don't want to see what those pictures looked like!

While you wait for them to bake you clean up a little bit in the kitchen, then when the timer goes off you take them out of the oven and put them on a wire rack to cool.  Voilà!  Homemade bagels!

When I told Mama what I was making, she begged, "Can't you make some without flax seeds?"  So I made a batch of Honey-Wheat bagels also: a richer dough made with honey and egg, then sprinkled with poppy seeds before baking.

 

The seed/onion bagels turned out looking a little withered, and I think that's because they boiled too long.  The recipe said to let them boil 3 minutes on each side, while the honey bagel recipe (which turned out looking much more like bagels you can buy) said to cook them only 45 seconds per side.  So next time I make bagels with seeds I will boil them less.  Oh well...  You don't learn unless you try!