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Beyond Sourdough Bread

Easy Homemade Sourdough Bagels are such a useful staple to have floating around the house! Like many sourdough recipes, the steps are simple but spread over a few days. Don’t let this discourage you! These delicious bagels are so worth the wait!

I love baking with a sourdough starter. I’m always on the hunt for recipes that work well with sourdough starter. This bagel recipe definitely qualifies.

Why Sourdough Bagels Work

A New York style bagel gets its chewy texture and authenticity from the process of long fermentation. When I made homemade bagels for the first time I was a nurse working night shift. On my nights off I would turn on Gilmore Girls and bake my way through some cookbook or another. When I found a homemade bagel recipe I was excited and then immediately discouraged to find out that it was a two-day process. However, I decided to give it a go and I’m so glad I did. This was probably my first experience with long fermentation and how it can really bring bread to life.

After falling in love with sourdough baking, I’ve really learned to embrace and lean on the long rise times, days of cold fermentation, etc. But even for a sourdough baker this is a long recipe spanning three days. My advice is to go for it. These bagels are everything you want them to be. They may be the best bagels you’ve ever had. They’re right out of a bagel shop. Chewy bagels, but not dense, full of flavor and life, and so fun to make. I think you’ll be amazed by the results!

When you have bagels on hand, you have the perfect breakfast. You have an easy sandwich option, and you have the perfect grab and go snack. I love having them around for easy weekend meals. Slathered with a thick layer of cream cheese and maybe a couple slices of bacon, they are such a treat! Once you get into the habit of making homemade sourdough bagels, there’s no going back!

Ingredients for Sourdough Bagels

Active Sourdough Starter: Because our bagels are being leavened by our wild yeast starter, we want to make sure we’re using bubbly, active starter. This will help give them a good rise.

Bread Flour or High Gluten Flour: To ensure our sourdough bagels have that nice chewy crumb, we want to use a flour with a higher gluten content. King Arthur bread flour is excellent in this recipe. It has a slightly higher gluten content than its competitors, making it perfect for bagels.

Salt: Use your favorite!

Brown Sugar: Can be replaced with honey or maple syrup

Favorite toppings: Everything bagel seasoning, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, or simply a bit of flaked sea salt.

Baking Soda: To be added to our water bath.

Tools

Stand Mixer: Because this is such a stiff dough, it is important to use a stand mixer. The good news is the stand mixer will handle all the work.

Dough hook attachment: Fit your mixer with the dough hook attachment for best results.

Large pot of water: Bagels get their signature chewy crust from be boiled in a water bath before baking.

Baking Sheets: x 2 lined with parchment paper

Wire rack: for draining and cooling the bagels.

Day 1:

This first step in this recipe is to make a sponge, or a levain with your starter. What does this mean? A day before mixing the sourdough bagel dough, take half a cup of active starter in a large bowl. Add four cups of bread flour. Then add 2 1/2 cups of water. We are simply feeding our starter to prepare for making the recipe. We feed it exact amounts of flour and water specific to this recipe. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a wet tea towel and allow it to sit at room temperature. After 12 hours, this mixture will look like active and bubbly starter. We will use all of it in the final bagel dough.

Day 2:

The next day, or after about 12 hours, you should see that your sponge has about doubled and is full of bubbles. It may look a little bit thinner than regular sourdough starter.

You’re ready to make bagel dough! Dump your sponge into the bowl of a stand mixer and add to it the remaining flour, salt, and brown sugar. Begin to mix on low with the dough hook until all the ingredients come together. Then turn the mixer up to medium high, and continue to knead with the mixer for about six minutes. Alternately, you can knead the dough on the counter for 10 minutes.

What starts as a rough and shaggy dough should become smooth and satiny and form a ball of dough around the dough hook. At this point, you’ll want to cover the dough and let it rest until doubled.

How do I Know My Dough is Ready to Shape?

When you’ve been baking bread for a while, you get really comfortable with eyeballing when your dough has doubled. However, I always think it’s funny that we expect ourselves to be able to bake instinctively right from the beginning. We want to have the skills of those old mothers who baked from their gut, but we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to learn those skills!

That being said, I love relying on a measured food container to determine when my dough has doubled. This storage container allows you to see exactly when your dough has doubled. Simply transfer the dough from the mixing bowl to the storage container after it’s been kneaded. Mark a line at the top of the dough with a dry erase marker and wait for it to double!

Once your sourdough bagel dough has doubled, take a moment to observe how it looks and feels. The dough should be puffy and rounded in the middle. When you touch it lightly with your fingers, it should not feel tacky, but smooth. It will not stick to your fingers. If you press on it, the dough will feel full of air and life! Each time you make bread dough, you get better and better at reading and responding to your dough.

Shaping your Sourdough Bagels

Prepare two baking sheets by lining them with parchment paper and greasing the parchment.

For large bagels, divide the dough into 8 equal pieces.
For standard sized bagels, divide the dough into 12 equal pieces.
For mini sized bagels, divide the dough into 16 equal pieces.

Step 1:

Form each piece of dough into a ball. To shape your bagels, take a dough ball and flip it over so that it’s seam side up. Use your fingers to gently press the dough into a rectangle about 2ish inches tall and 5ish inches wide. Take the bottom edge of the dough and fold it up and over two thirds of the way covering the dough. Press the dough to seal the seam.

Once again, take the bottom edge of dough, the folded edge, and roll it up to form a rope approximately four inches wide. Take a moment to reflect fondly on making snakes out of play dough 🙂 Use the palms of your hands to roll the dough back and forth, stretching as you go, until you have a length of about 8 inches.

Step 2:

Take the length of dough in one hand. Wrap the dough around your four fingers so that both ends are tucked together at your palm. The ends should overlap by about an inch. Roll your palm along the counter back and forth to seal the ends together.

Transfer:

Once you’ve formed a ring, transfer it to a parchment-lined baking sheet. Repeat this process with the remaining pieces of dough until you have all of your shaped bagels ready to go!. Allow about 3 inches between each bagel. You may need 2 sheet pans to fit all of the bagels.

Wrap the cookie sheet tightly with plastic wrap so that the bagel dough won’t dry out in the fridge. Place the pan in the fridge and let them cold ferment for 12 hours or up to three days. While they’re in the fridge, the bagels will puff up slightly. If you’ve ever made bagels with commercial yeast, you may have noticed that it’s very easy to over-proof. You’ll end up with wrinkly bagels that collapse during the boiling process. Sourdough bagels are much harder to over-proof, especially because most of the rising happens in the fridge.

Day 3

Get ready for baking day!

– Make sure you have cream cheese at the ready!

– Preheat your oven to 500 degrees

– Prepare your water bath. Add 1 tablespoon of baking soda to a large pot of water and bring the water to a boil.

To boil bagels:

Pull the baking pans out of the refrigerator. Place a cooling rack close to the pot of water. When it’s reached a full, rolling boil, gently drop three bagels (or however many will fit in the pot without crowding) into the boiling water. Allow the water to return to a boil and set a timer for 30 seconds. Use a slotted spoon to gently flip each bagel and continue to boil for another 30 seconds.

Finally, use the slotted spoon to remove the bagels from the water and transfer them to the cooling rack. Giving them a few minutes to sit on the cooling rack prevents water from pooling on the cookie sheet which can result in soggy-bottomed bagels. Not great. Repeat with the remaining bagels.

To Bake Sourdough Bagels

Transfer the bagels back to their original spots on the cookie sheets. Now is the time to top your bagels as desired. You may choose to leave them plain, or add a hearty sprinkling of everything bagel seasoning, poppy seeds, or sesame seeds. My favorite way to top bagels is with coarse salt and freshly ground pepper! I find that the bagels are still wet enough that the toppings stick on easily. However, if you’re having difficulty, you can always choose to egg wash them prior to adding your toppings.

Bake the bagels for 5 minutes at 500 degrees. After the first five minutes, decrease the oven temp to 450 degrees and continue to bake for an additional 5 minutes. When done the bagels should have a golden brown crust and an internal temperature of 200 degrees.

Let your bagels cool completely on a wire rack. Slice them open with a serrated bread knife and enjoy with a thick slab of cream cheese! And be proud of yourself because you just made bagels! I can’t think of anything more exciting 🙂

Sourdough Bagels

Sourdough Bagels are chewy and delicious and so handy to having around the house. Whether slathering on some cream cheese or turning one into a sandwich, you’ll be so glad you decided to make bagels today!

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Prep Time 2

Cook Time 15

Course Breakfast, Snack

Servings 12

Ingredients

Sponge

100 g Active Sourdough Starter 1/2 cup
480 g Bread Flour or High Gluten Flour 4 cups
600 g water 2.5 cups

Dough

450 g Bread Flour or High Gluten Flour 3 3/4 cup
1 tbsp Coarse Salt
1 tbsp Brown Sugar Can use honey or maple syrup

To Boil

1 tbsp Baking Soda
1 Large Pot of Water