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My husband and my son are both bagel fans. Egg bagels, in particular. After years of buying Sara Lee Egg bagels I discovered, to my horror, that not only do they contain high fructose corn syrup but also Yellow #5. WHAT!? The HFCS is bad enough, but not a huge surprise. But food coloring in bread? Why? So that they look different than the plain bagels? Needless to say, I was disgusted.
Thus began my quest for a better bagel. The recipe I tried is from a blog called Brown Eyed Baker which I had not previously heard of but now enjoy quite a lot.
The bagels seemed a bit intimidating. Reading over the recipe, it seemed like there were a lot of steps and lots of things I'd never done before. Like, boiling dough. However, by just following directions (surprise!) I was able to produce some pretty tasty bagels, I must say! The only thing I will change next time I make these is boiling the dough longer. I did them for only 1 minute per side as the recipe advises, but they were not chewy enough for us. The 1 minute per side produced a bagel that was just barely different than a roll. So, 2 minutes or 2.5 per side is what we'll do next time.
Bagel making is quite magical actually. There's a step where you test the dough to find out if it's ready to be retarded (I guess to stop the rising?). You do this by dropping a raw bagel into a bowl of room temperature water to see if it floats. If it does, you put the bagels in the fridge overnight. If it does not float, you let them sit for a few more minutes and try again. I had try twice before it floated on the third try. Magic!
Also, I froze half the batch for a couple of weeks and they thawed perfectly. We eat don't eat food very quickly around here so I'm always stoked when I can freeze something successfully. Let me know if you try these out!
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