Making bagels

It's hard to find bagels where we live. We can find industrial bagels in the supermarket, but they're not as good as those made in a real bagel shop. Paris has a few bagel shops, but that's hours away. And they're not quite the same as the bagels I remember in New York, Montréal, and San Francisco. I had bagels in Montréal (at St. Viateur) in 2016 and they were delicious!

Three sesame, three poppy, and two plain bagels cooling on racks after baking.

So, I've learned to make my own bagels. They're called water bagels because they cook in boiling water before they're baked. It takes some time for kneading and rising, but it's not difficult at all. I set aside a few hours on Tuesday morning to make a batch. With the recipe I use, a batch is eight bagels. That's a good amount for us. Any more would need to be frozen (which we've done, and they freeze pretty well). The dough (4.5 cups flour, a little sugar, salt, 1.5 cups warm water and 2 1/4 tsp. active dry yeast) gets mixed and kneaded before it rests and rises for one to four hours. It can even rise over night in the refrigerator, but you need to let it get back up to room temperature the next day before making the bagels.

Boiling the bagels. The hole almost closes, but not quite.

After the first rise, I shape the bagels by making eight equal balls of dough and pushing my thumb through the center of each. Then, after a second, shorter rise, the bagels cook in simmering water for about six or seven minutes. Before they're simmered, they look a little small, but as they cook they puff up to a good size. Then they get topped (with sesame or poppy seeds or anything else you like) and go into the oven to bake. Once cooled, they're ready to eat! On Tuesday, we ate some for lunch with cream cheese and smoked salmon. This morning, we each had one toasted with just a schmear. Yum.

If you're wondering, "schmear" comes from the Yiddish word for "spread," so a bagel with a schmear is a bagel spread with cream cheese. I think it's a New York thing.