That was my roommate’s comment when she saw my first completed, less than successful attempt at making bagels. HM.
It figures that it was the first day of Lent, and I should have a nagging hankering to bake. Well, that’s fine – plenty of things to bake that wouldn’t constitute sweets, right? I had been looking at all these lovely photos and posts of beautiful, perfect, “so easy to make” bagels that I thought I would give it a try, even though I’ve never even made anything with active yeast before. That might have been my first issue.
Anyhoo. I used this recipe…and had a few minor, um, issues. The first is that I don’t have a stand mixer, so I was using the dough hook for my hand mixer – not sure if that really makes a difference (or if I’m just making yet another excuse for why I need one?), but I had to add quite a bit of extra flour to the dough in order to make it dry and not sticky. I followed everything else exactly, but never quite had a dry enough dough – and in retrospect, probably didn’t let them rise enough. So what I ended up with were very dense, chewy, salty “bagels.” The taste actually wasn’t bad – but the texture wasn’t quite bagel-esque.
Having said all that, I do not believe my roommate. I’m pretty confident that my first bagel adventure was hindered by baker error, so I will try again!
I say try again! I also felt like I had to keep adding dough, so I altered the recipe to include more dough than the original asked for…
Oh, I’m so sorry they didn’t turn out for you! Seriously, try the recipe that I tried. Even for someone who is frightened of yeast (me), it was a pretty easy recipe and the dough came out perfectly (though it was too cold at my house so I set them to proof into a 100F oven). I don’t have a stand mixer either, so I kneaded it by hand and it took about 13-15 min of kneading to get the dough to be smooth and elastic. The recipe I used could probably use an extra sprinkling of salt on the bagels – mine were not salty at all. I hope you make bagels again, it was totally worth it! I was so freaked out that I didn’t look into the oven until they were almost done, and then I exclaimed, “omg, they look like REAL BAGELS!” To which my husband rolled his eyes, like, *this* is what you get excited about?! LOL.