How to Make Homemade Bagels – Pumpkin Spice

***UPDATE – See this post about our new eating habits. (7/10/11)

I love bagels…..something about a toasted bagel just makes me happy. I love getting bagels from bakeries, but ya know sometimes I don’t feel like going out just to get a bagel. That would mean I’d have to put something on besides my PJs. Some days, that just ain’t happening. Can I get a witness?!  Homemade bagels make the ones in the store taste like shoe leather. It’s really not that hard to make homemade bagels, it just takes a little bit of time – just like anything you use with yeast. I LOVE baking with yeast. It’s so magical and bubbly…..and smelly. But smelly in a good way – not like with socks.

We’re going to make Pumpkin Spice Bagels today. This is just a tutorial to give you a general idea of how homemade bagels are made. I’ll include the recipe, but this will just give you the confidence to know that when you see a bagel recipe that you can actually do it….if Stacy can do it, you can do it. For these we’ll need bread flour, cornmeal, ground cloves, cinnamon, yeast, nutmeg, ground ginger, salt, brown sugar, egg, water, and pureed pumpkin.

Grab a small glass dish and dissolve your yeast in warm water. My friend Kim told me that someone passed along to her how to know your water is the right temperature for yeast – make sure it’s no hotter than what you’d put a baby in for a bath. You wouldn’t want to scald your baby, and you don’t want to scald your yeast……the yeast won’t cry, it’ll die. Then again, you don’t want to put your baby in cold water either….your yeast will shiver and shrink instead of getting all poofy.  I always stir my yeast with a plastic spoon. I have absolutely no idea why – I just do it. It seems delicate. However, I’m not sure why I need to be delicate with it, considering I’m going to knead the heck out of it in a minute.

Now, pour your yeast mixture into a large bowl along with the pumpkin, brown sugar, salt, and spices. Mix it up well, but don’t get carried away. It’s sloshy and it will slosh right over the side of the bowl.

Now, it’s time to add the flour. We’re going to add about three cups of bread flour. Stir it until it comes together. A lot of times I will just mix it up with my hands because I feel like I can get a better idea of how it’s doing.

You want it to look like this. It needs to be stiff enough that it becomes a ball as you stir it. If it’s not stiff enough, add a bit more flour. We’re going to knead it, so we need it to be stiff and not sticky…..or else it will be all over us and the kneading surface.

Put your dough out onto a lightly floured surface. As you can see, I went a little overboard with my “lightly” floured part. Oops. You can start with a little and add more as you need it. My dough looked like it had rolled through a snow drift, but I worked it out.

You need to knead it about 6-8 minutes or until it’s smooth and springy. Right about now, someone is going to call you on the phone – mainly because you have flour all over your hands and you’re trying to keep track of how long you’ve been kneading. You will know you’ve kneaded enough when you poke it with your finger and the dough springs right back out. It’s fun. It’s okay if you want to poke it a few times just to watch.

Put your dough down into a greased bowl. Make sure to turn it over so that the entire surface is lightly covered. This will help it not to stick to the bowl as it rises.

As usual, I let mine rise in the oven with the light on. It gets pretty toasty in there. In fact, I’ve considered pulling a chair up to it and putting my feet in there sometimes during the winter when I’m freezing my toots off. You need to let it rise until it’s doubled. I think it took mine about 3 hours. The recipe states 1 hour……I don’t know that I’ve ever had bread ready in one hour. Bread has a mind of its own. It must be female.

Grab a big pot and fill it two-thirds with water. Bring it to a boil. No, we’re not having a baby. We’re having a bagel.

My dough is ready! Actually, it looked more poofy than this, but I poked it with my finger and it deflated a bit before I remembered to take the picture. Something about poofy dough just makes me wanna poke it.

Put your dough back onto a lightly floured surface. Knead it just a few times and then divide into 9 pieces. Mine is only in 8 pieces, but they weren’t even. So, I pinched a little here and a little there and then I had 9 pieces. They weren’t all the same size….that’s okay. I’ll give Barry the little ones and eat the bigger ones myself. I can take the fall.

Roll each piece into a ball. Take your finger and stick it through the middle. Work with the dough until it has about an opening in the center of about 1 inch. It should look like a doughnut. I put mine on my finger and just twirl it around until it looks right. I can’t hoola hoop, but I can do this!

When your water is boiling, you’ll drop two bagels at a time down into the boiling water. Boil them about 45 seconds on each side. When one side is done, flip it over. This part is pretty weird isn’t it? Did you know bagels were boiled? Shocking. I like to shock people. I’ll spare you and not tell you anything shocking about me right here. You’re welcome.

When you get done boiling them, put them on a lint-free towel to drain a little bit. Then proceed with your other bagels. You could also use paper towels, but I’m trying to limit my paper towel usage and stick to more cloth towels. STICK IT TO THE MAN! (That was for you Brandy.)

Get a cookie sheet and spray it with cooking spray. Then sprinkle it with corn meal. Why? Who knows. Most bagel recipes call for this part. I guess it keeps them from sticking. Ours is not to question why, just to eat the bagels.

In a small bowl, mix up your egg white and a little water. Don’t get too happy and slosh it over the side so that you have to clean everything up with Clorox…..that happens to me every time.

Place your bagels on the corn meal baking sheet and brush them with egg white (also called an egg wash). This makes them look nice and pretty when they bake. Sorta shiny.

I sprinkled mine with cinnamon sugar after the egg wash. I just love cinnamon. I try to put it into everything I can think of. Pumpkin and cinnamon just go together.

Bake them in the oven until they’re nice and browned. It might be hard to tell since they’re sorta already brown from the spices. If you’re in doubt, cut into one and check.  Remove them from the pans to cool on a wire rack.

These are just so yummy! They’re not dry like some bagels you get in the store. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how good they are and how easy they are to make. The cinnamon sugar really topped them off nicely.

(The recipe below is for a bread machine. To make these without one, just follow my instructions and use the same measurements.)