Learning Bagels: First of Many

While I've made bagels before, I've never been perfectly satisfied with them. So today I decided to try two new things with them: First a new shaping method, and second not boiling half of the bagels. Just cooking them straight, and seeing if they kept their shape. In the past when I've made bagels they collapsed slightly during boiling and cooking. I wanted to be sure that it was my handling or shaping that needed work, and not my dough creating/kneading. Long story short for those of you that don't feel like reading the whole thing: It's all in the transfers of the dough.

I mixed a tablespoon of yeast with 1 3/4 cups of water and 2 tablespoons of sugar. I stirred this together then let it sit while I got the rest of the ingredients out and prepped the counter for kneading. I then mixed in 4 1/2 cups of flour and a tablespoon of salt, then kneaded for 10 minutes. I was worried the dough was too dense and wouldn't rise enough, so instead of a quick 30 minute rise I gave them 90 minutes. The dough was still very dense but had doubled in size so I separated it into 12ths and shaped the balls of dough into bagels. I tried a new method of shaping the, rolling the dough into a log and using water to join the ends together. It seemed fine when I put them down to rise, although the dough was resisting stretching. I gave the now shaped dough 20 minutes, then put half on a cornmeal dusted cookie sheet and the other half into a pot of boiling water, with a tablespoon of sugar dissolved in it.

When I put the half-dozen bagels into the pot of boiling water, my first mistake was apparent. By using water for the join, I created an easy point of weakness. To my lack of surprise they separated at the join. My first instinct was to reach in and try to re-close them, which I suspect would have been a poor choice given that they were floating in boiling water! After 3 minutes on the initial side I flipped them, and gave them another 4 minutes to finish the boil. I took them out of the pot and put them onto a second cookie sheet, likewise prepared with cornmeal, and put both sheets into the 375 degree oven. I checked them at 10 minutes and saw the non-boiled bagels had expanded considerably, while the boiled ones were still pale and even slightly damp still. I switched the racks they were placed on and gave them another 10 minutes. After that I pulled out the non-boiled bagels, as they were fully cooked while the top side of the boiled bagels looked identical do how they did when they were put in.

They look like decent, bagelish rolls. Not what I was hoping for, but certainly not bad! They tasted good, and except for having closed interiors they were close to what I was hoping to see. The same can not be said for the boiled samples.

What you don't see is the burned black bottoms. Part of the problem is I suspect the cookie sheet they were cooked on. It's a simple metal sheet, not an air buffered one or stone. The bottoms were burned nearly black, while the tops are barely thoroughly cooked. They taste great, and ignoring the bottom the texture was good.
Ultimately I made 3 mistakes: first my dough was overly dense, leading to slow rising, also causing a poorly developed internal structure. Fix: use slightly more water, less flour, and knead more throughly. This should give a better internal structure, while allowing for a more airy finished product. Second, shaping. The density of the dough contributed to this, as the logs were hard to elongate enough to make a proper bagel. I should have shaped them into balls then let them rest for 10-15 minutes to let the gluten relax. This also would have given them a bit more time to rise, making a better final bagel. Finally the cookie sheet and oven placement. The boiled bagels started close to the heat source on a non-air cushioned sheet. This meant the bottom cooked FAR faster then the rest of the bagel, resulting in the state the bagels ended up in. I would also cut out a teaspoon of salt. While the taste is fine there is a fairly salty flavor. I think next time I make these I'll use a cup of sourdough stater in the place of 3/4ths of the yeast, to give it a fuller more rounded flavor without relying on the salt.

GRADING:
Crust: D
Crumb: C
Taste: B
Overall: C
 I'll be making bagels again next weekend, although I might use another one of my irregular bread projects as the blog post instead next Saturday. If you have any suggestions, or a getter bagel recipe let me know in the comments, and see you Monday!