Making Sourdough Bagels

I missed the COVID sourdough wave, but recent developments have welcomed me in, late to the party.

First, Dave Atkinson wrote, in his weekly email newsletter, about his sourdough revelation:

Modern bread is made with refined wheat. A good chunk of the grain has been discarded. And it’s made with instant yeast. That’s not how we made bread for the first 99.99% of its history. Before a hundred years ago, it you ate bread, it was the whole grain. More importantly, it was made through fermentation. It was made with sourdough.

It turns out, a lot of people with gluten insensitivity can eat sourdough bread. I had somehow not heard this. The act of slow fermenting changes the structure of gluten making it easier to digest.

Next, Jeremy Cherfas recalled the COVID sourdough wave, and linked to a helpful earlier post, with a lot of helpful comments, about sourdough starter.

Finally, as if the above was queuing me up for action, my sister-in-law Karen offered me some sourdough starter (née her chiropractor’s sourdough starter), which was enough to push me over the edge.

I started out slowly, making a couple of loaves of bread, graduated to pizza dough last week, and over the last 24 hours I made bagels. Bagels that, if I don’t say so myself, are rather amazing.

Here’s the process in photos.

I used this recipe, which called for 12 hours of letting the dough rise, so, after mixing everything together in a stand-up mixer with the dough hook, I left the dough in a metal bowl, covered, overnight. When I woke up this morning, it had doubled in size:

I divided the dough into eight pieces…

…and shaped the pieces into balls, and then poked a hole into each one, and shaped them into bagels:

I let the bagels rise, covered, for another hour:

After this second rise, I boiled the bagels, four at a time, two minutes per side:

After giving them a little time to cool down, I baked the bagels on parchment paper in a 425ºF oven for 25 minutes. The emerged golden brown:

Once the bagels had cooled, I sliced them up for lunch. They had a pleasantly chewy crust, and a pleasantly bagel-like interior:

Needless to say, we enjoyed sandwiches on bagels for lunch: