Go to the Recipe: Amazing Chewy Bagels From Scratch
My KitchenAir Professional 600 made some concerning noises, but it managed to do it. I wouldn't dare scale the recipe up any higher, though.
I didn't develop this recipe, but I'll see if I can help you out.
For bread recipes, as a starting point, I generally ignore the yeast amount entirely and look directly at the flour amount. A good starting point is 20% starter against the total flour amount. For 650g bread flour, you're looking at around 130g of starter (1:1 hydration, at peak).
Note that this incorporation may affect the final texture of the bagel, and adds 65 g of flour and 65g of water to the recipe. So, to get the recipe back in line, in theory, you would subtract 65g from 650g=585g bread flour, and use 285g water. The flour in the starter has undergone some degree of proteolysis, so it has limited gluten potential, meaning the dough may handle differently, and have a potentially more slack quality/texture.
Adjusted workflow looks something like this:
1. Autolyse bread flour and water for 30 min.
2. Mix in starter; rest 30 min
3. Mix in salt, sugar, diastatic malt powder
4. Do not go straight to fridge as written. Monitor bulk fermentation at room temperature at 30-45 minute intervals, incorporating folds (stretch and fold or coil folds) as needed, until dough is roughly doubled in size
5. Degas, divide and portion
6. Proceed with recipe as written
This will probably get you close, but there are likely tweaks along the way you'll need to make to account for slower fermentation. The written recipe doesn't include much proof time at room temperature. But proofing moves a bit slower if you're relying on a starter alone for leavening. For example, after shaping, you may need to proof the shaped bagels for longer until they pass the float test before retarding in the fridge. But overall, these tips should get you started.
Hope this helps!
Anyone have a version of this with 100% sourdough starter instead of yeast?
If I wanted to make a large quantity for an event in the future, any tips on par baking? Or is this just a bad idea?
Bought a spiral mixer so I had to put it to the test with this low-hydration bagel dough—as always these bagels are incredible. (100g 20 min bake as per my last comment).
1. Oven temp is probably too high, or there is too much baking soda and/or malt syrup in the water.
2. The bagels really need that overnight step while formed as tbis is a very low hydration dough and it needs that time to relax and develop. Also, because of the boiling step, you’d run the risk of using up all the yeast in the boil stage and not have any left for the oven. Plus, it really makes it easy to bake them in the morning. Hope that helps!
I have a couple of questions:
1. my bagels always come out too dark outside and still raw on the inside. Any ideas why that might be happening?
2. What is the purpose of forming the eagles before letting them sit in the fridge over night? Theoretically speaking, could this step be done pre-forming? i.e could I place the dough in the fridge, and then form the balls in the morning? Alternatively, could I follow the steps up to forming the balls, place them in the fridge overnight, and then form them into the final bagel shape in the morning?
Easily the best bagel recipe/method that I've come across in 20+ years of being a chef. I did increase the size to 125 grams each, and adjusted the bake time accordingly. My only comment is that this is not a job for a Kitchen Aid mixer. Luckily, I have an industrial mixer that can handle the low hydration, but otherwise would need to knead by hand, or in a food processor. Can't wait to make these again!
i have a question! i’ve made these a dozen times, it’s top tier. however i was wondering. step one, the sponge…is it possible to make the sponge a day in advance and proceed with every step on day two? and if so, should i store the sponge in the fridge or is it ok on the counter for 24 hours?
Also sometimes adding high moisture items to bread dough requires you to add more flour to compensate. The bagels will be very blue or purple at this point. Adding ascorbic acid or malic acid will not only brighten the color it will punch up the berry flavor.
Use dried blueberries or incorporate freeze dried berries. You can soften them with water or alcohol if you wish.
how would you add Blueberries? the moisture of them seems to give me a hard time.
Wow, possibly the best bagels I've ever had—store bought or homemade. Super chewy but not too dense, and crusty with tons of microblistering. I like that the bagels go straight from the fridge to the boiling water in the morning, so I could do all the prepping and proofing the night before. I made two small changes:
1. Increased the bagel size to 100g and the bake duration accordingly (approx 20 min).
2. Couldn't get diastatic malt powder on short notice and replaced it with the same weight of barley malt syrup.
Note the comment in the recipe about the mixer working hard... ten minutes in my kitchenaid started (actually) smoking so I did the rest of the kneading by hand.
These are fantastic. They came out golden, and had that delicious chew and crust that a good bagel has. Only issue I had was all the seeds almost instantly fell off the minute I cut the bagel. Like literally all of them. I seeded them right out of the water. I have seen some recipes call for an egg wash before baking. Would that help them stick? 65 grams is also way too small. This is a good size if your serving a crowd brunch. But for a regular bagel, definitely up the amount to 90 or 100 grams.
Thank you!!
Quite a few. When I baked bagels as a teenager we boiled in a large kettle and drained after there was too much cornmeal from the trays. This was after dozens and dozens. We also topped off with fresh water and more malt syrup here and there.
How many batches can I do in the same bath?
My third time making bagels I decided to use ChefSteps recipe and what a good choice. My husband and I loved these bagels! Incorporating the diastatic malt powder gave the bagels a "warm luscious" taste. For boiling the bagels I used molasses didn't have malt syrup and still the outside crust was just right. I have the Breville smart oven BOV900 (not the Joule one) what a prefect air fryer oven. The bagels baked perfectly. The only question I have to ask is, after resting in refrigerator for 20 minutes can I roll the dough to form a "log" so I can cut 65g easier?
For sure. Use this as a base recipe for any inclusion. Soaking raisins will help but not completely necessary. I would start out with 1/2 cup of raisins and 2 tsp of cinnamon. Try adding dried blueberries or cranberries too.
Is it possible to make these cinnamon and raisin bagels and if so what do you add and how much ?
I would guess baking soda is more common, accessible, and less dangerous to use than lye for the average person.
What no lye bath?!? or is this dummied up for the masses?
diastatic malt powder is for the boosting of the enzymatic effect of converting the starches into sugars and feeding the yeast, helping taste and browning as side effects.
There is an error in step 8 regarding the concentration of malt syrup, baking soda to water ratio. The ratio should be the same regardless of whether you are boiling one bagel or 15. However, if you edit the amount, the ratio at this point of malt syrup and baking soda to water changes, because the malt syrup and baking soda amounts change while the water amount remains at 5L.
There is an error in step 8. If you change the recipe amount, the concentration of malt syrup, baking soda to water ration in the boil should not change, but it does. Making for more/less dilute mixture. The ratio of malt syrup/baking soda to water should be the same regardless of the amount of bagels being made. I believe this is a recurrent error on the chef steps site for these types of recipes.
Malted barley flour or Barley malt.
Is there another term/name for diastatic malt powder? Barley flour or something? Thanks!!
Made first batch today, looking great i think, taste is amazing with the everything topping. Just be careful about the boiling time. Some deflated a bit, the ones I cooked for full minute on each side. Overall, very good recipe and easy to make
I was wondering , after I boiled them and transfer to the tray to bake some of them deflated, any reason why?
Hey Matthew, thanks for getting back to me! I'm pretty careful about timing while boiling, but perhaps my overproofing errors come earlier. I'm planning to try again this weekend and will be documenting the process more carefully. Will report back
Hello Alex, They could be thin and blond from over proofing. The over proofing could happen in the boiling stage. Depending on how much they are proofed before boiling could affect the boiling time. If the bagels are boiled for too long then they will fall flat and not bake properly. Next time try boiling for less time and see what that gets you. Feel free to show pictures too, they help to troubleshoot.
I've made these five times now and while every time I swear I've followed the directions to the letter, they've never come out as tall or brown as they do in the recipe. The flavor is great and I still get a nice interior/exterior crispy/chewy contrast, but the blondeness and thinness are hard to explain. Any troubleshooting tips?
Binging with babish does a video using the bagel recipe found here (how i came upon it) and he does everything on camera link below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv43IN_cnyw&list=TLGGuuWRlRaf4WoyNDA3MjAxOQ&index=9 Binging with Babish: Bagel Sandwiches from Steven Universe\
Hope this helps
My first time making this and I can say they are really really nice
Nice crust and chewiness
I baked mine at 220*c for 18 min
Next time I’ll make them a bit bigger 100-120g
Overall very good recipe 👌
This is the second time I’ve made a half recipe and they turned our great! They’re so good my wife asked me never to make them again… (unsaid - "because they’re so good I’ll get so fat eating them!" She immediately wanted me to give a couple to her best friend so they couldn’t be too bad…). Crunchy crust, chewy crumb, great flavor. Better than any bagel I’ve bought in New York, Montreal, LA, San Francisco, etc. No need to toast them if you eat them while they’re warm from the oven (ate my first one 10 minutes after I took them out). If they’ve cooled to room temp and the crust is not crackling as you push on it, warm them up in a 325 oven/toaster oven for about 5 minutes until the crust is crunchy again. I usually like my commercial bagels toasted a dark gold color but I liked these bagels better untoasted with a crunchy crust because I get the full flavor of the crumb.
Second batch “tricks” I figured out from my first batch semi-failure:
1. Used King Arthur Bread flour (12.7% protein). Use a high protein flour to get chewiness.
2. Use warm water (108 degrees F measured with a Thermapen) for the sponge instead of water just out of the tap (especially true in the winter).
3. Proof sponge in 110 degree F oven (my oven has a proof setting, which shocked my wife).
4. Mix really well in a stand mixer at lower speed (I used 2 on my KitchenAid), it does take 15 to 20 minutes. The dough should be difficult to stretch out from the ball. This is where the chewiness is built up.
5. Can use a Silpat instead of parchment paper and non-stick oil spray up until you put the bagels in the oven. This makes handling the bagels less messy.
6. Baked with a baking stone in the oven (give at least 30 minutes preheating to build up the heat in the stone) and put bagels on parchment paper (no oil spray) on backside of a half sheet pan so the parchment paper could be slid off the sheet pan like a pizza peel easily on to the baking stone. This gave a crunchy bottom.
7. I put Trader Joe’s Everything Bagel mix in a soup bowl and “dunked” the top of each bagel into the mix. This resulted in more Everything on the bagels than the sprinkle on top method (bagel on the left in the middle row of the photo used the sprinkle method). I had to be careful not to squeeze the bagels as I was dunking.
In the photo, the bagel in the lower right weighed 100g instead of the 65g in the recipe. It turned out to be pretty much the same size a commercial bagels. I cooked it following the normal recipe instructions and it turned out perfect. I’ll probably switch to this size bagel in the future unless I need more of the “party size” 65g bagels.
Possible BUG in the Web site recipe scaler: the weights for the malt syrup and baking soda that go into the boiling water should not be scaled, unless the amount of boiling water is also scaled. Using a constant 5 liters/quarts of boiling water regardless of how many bagels you are making, as the scaled recipe calls for, makes sense because of the pot sizes available in typical homes (scaling the amount of water for restaurants and bakeries may make sense since they have much larger pot sizes available to them). Being able to boil the bagels in a doubled recipe in a 7 liter/quart pot (a commonly available home-sized pot that can hold 5 liters of water with room for the bagels) instead of needing a 12 or 13 liter/quart pot (not a common home-sized pot) to boil a doubled recipe makes it possible to bake such a large batch at home (need a 22 or 24 liter pot for a quadrupled recipe - forget about it!). One might argue that more bagels “use up” more of the malt syrup and baking soda and so the quantity of these ingredients need to increase as the quantity of bagels increases. If this were the case, the effect of the “used upness” of these ingredients from the first bagel boiled in a batch to the last one should have a discernible taste, color, or crunchiness difference in the crust and/or crumb of the bagels depending on the sequence in which they were boiled. In my experience, I have found no such differences from the first bagel boiled to the last in the same recipe batch. So, don’t scale the malt syrup and baking soda.
Is it possible to substitute Molasses for the barley malt?
I have made these several times and they are great! Done some experimenting with recipe and have prepared them with full amount of malt powder seemed to soft to me, 1/2 a point of malt powder still soft but better and then with no malt powder more like traditional NY bagel that we are use too, chewy and crunchy liked them the best. So if you are stuck at home (like everyone) and don’t have malt powder handy they will work just fine and again in my opinion they are better and still wonderful. I don’t have malt syrup on hand (who does?) I put about 6 tablespoons of Baking Soda into water to boil bagels helps give them a shiny finished crust. Enjoy!!!
1st time making bagels and found this to be easy to follow and with great results. My mixer is currently not working so the wife and I hand kneaded for 15 min. Good workout. My biggest issue was how much space 2 half sheets take in my fridge.
They came out great!
Hi what's the purpose of the malt powder? It can't be merely for the purpose of adding flavor?
Would you do a video of making the dough into the bagel shape? I’m a very experienced bread baker and have made bagels many times. Mine never look even close to what yours do. Thank you !
Perfect !
I loved this recipe. It was pretty simple and not all that time consuming. The pre supersize bagels were perfect portions.
Finally got around to making these. Fantastic! Even my picky kids loved them. I find that the bagels are pretty small. Next time I will double the weight to 130g and see how that does.
