There are many bagel recipes out there on the internet and in cooking books. I was particularly interested in recipes that use a dough similar to bread dough. So I made a traditional dough, water + yeast + flour + salt, and I added some honey (most bagel recipes take honey or molasses).
I made the dough in the KitchenAid, which now I think may have been a mistake. Subsequent attemps to make bread using the KitchenAid to knead the dough have yielded doughs that are not elastic enough and required extra work by hand.
These rings are more difficult to make than you would think. I started by making dough balls and then making a hole with my finger. But the dough was just too soft for this. The best bagels were made by rolling the dought into a long cilinder and joining the ends.
The bagels had to be boiled. This was not also pretty hard. I guess all my struggles with this recipe had to do with the fact that the dough was just too soft. When boiling, I tried adding baking soda to the water (I saw that in a recipe online). I assumed that this would accelerate the Maillard reaction. In the end, I could not see the difference between the bagels boiled in baking soda and those boiled just water.
The final treat. Bagels with cream chese and salmon.
