Ingredients (makes 6 bagels):
- 3/4 cup water
- 1 package yeast (7g or about a teaspoon)
- 3/4 ounce sugar
- 1/4 ounce salt
- 1 and 3/4 cup wholemeal bread flour
- egg white (to glaze)
- toppings of your choice (I used dried basil, black pepper and sea salt)
Method:
1) Mix yeast, sugar and warm water together and let it stand for 5 minutes or so.
2) Mix about half the flour with the salt and add to the yeast mixture. Stir until combined and slowly mix in the rest of the flour.
3) Knead onto an oiled surface (and oil your hands to prevent the dough sticking!) for about five minutes until you have a very firm dough.
4) Place the dough into a greased bowl, cover with cling film, and leave somewhere warm to prove for about an hour or doubled in size. I like the airing cupboard as my proving space but am always too impatient for the proving to happen.
5) After proving once, knock back the dough (knead again for about 5 minutes) and divide into 6 balls.
6) Allow the dough to rest for about 5 minutes.
7) Bring a big saucepan of water to the boil.
8) Now for the fun part. With your thumb, make a hole in the middle of one of the balls of dough, and make a hole about 2 inches wide. I span the bagel around my finger to stretch the hole and found this worked pretty well. Repeat until all 6 balls of dough are now a bagel shape. My tip here would be to make sure that you don't have any skinny side bits of your bagel and they are all pretty much the same width.
9) Place these bagel-shaped bits of dough onto a baking sheet and cover with cling film for 10 minutes.
12) Now for the tricky part. Plonk two or three bagels into the simmering water for about 20 seconds then flip the bagels, another twenty seconds, then hoik out and get them onto a baking sheet. Continue until all the bagels have been boiled for about 45 seconds in total.
13) Brush the tops of these bagels with an egg white and sprinkle on your toppings of choice.
14) Bake in an oven at about 200 degrees, for 35 minutes until nice and golden brown and glossy. I put half in the freezer and kept half out. Enjoy for lunch filled with cream cheese and cucumber or my other favourite sarnie filling, pesto and feta. Yum yum.