The next item in the alphabet of bread baking is... Bagels! I've been looking forward to this experiment because I LOVE good bagels, and I hate bagels that you get most places that are large and bland. This meant that I immediately knew I'd be making mini-bagels - small and cute.
The baking itself is not too bad. You can read the recipe here as I do not want to re-type it up. It takes two days and a couple of raises but nothing too annoying. The ingredients are the difficult part. The recipe calls for high gluten flour. So I got some at the grocery store and started making the dough with it. Well... the dough was thick. Very thick. And extremely sticky and terrifying. So just to make myself calmer I decided to make a second batch of bagels with regular bread flour (oh I am so thankful for this). So double the fun and double the bagels!
The kneading portion of the process was intense. I did not feel safe putting the dough in my stand mixer because it was SO thick. So on to the table. Ryan was nice enough to help kneading the gluten-dough. I think my arms would have collapsed if I did both. It was SUPER thick even with more water added.
Well.... still not too bad. On the first day I divided the dough into pieces and shaped it into bagels and put them into the fridge.
The second day is when it gets interesting.
The basic process for cooking a bagels is to boil it for two minutes per side and then bake it for about ten minutes. I started with the gluten bagels for boiling.
Well... as soon as you put then into the water they started poofing like CRAZY. Expanding so that three of them were overflowing my pot. Insanity. With some panic and a bit of mess I got through it.
Now on to the oven. I got the bagels in the oven (the gluten ones). They bake and expand even MORE. I was afraid they were not going to fit and might catch the broiler or the other shelves. Happily this was avoided.
So I get them out and they are huge. I set them aside and move on to baking the bread-flour bagels. These ones do NOT expand like crazy and look much more manageable. Yay!
As I am about to put the bread-flour bagels in the oven I look over at the pans of high-gluten flour bagels. Uh-oh. They have de-poofed. They are flat and wide and gross looking. Not bagels. Heart sink.
THANKFULLY I had my bread-flour bagels to save the day. They turned out tasting just like... delicious bagels! I would change some things - maybe boil a bit longer, put on different topics and shape them better? But they turned out great. So gluten free flour? AH NO. You all ended up in the trash after I got some photos (and waited for Ryan to get home so he could be amazed at them too).
So yes. Next bread baking item complete, but not without casualties.
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