Making bagels from scratch this weekend was surprisingly easy. I thought there would be a lot of prep involved like in baking bread where you would need to let the dough rise overnight, but the total rising time was probably less than thirty minutes. I roughly followed the directions from Dolcetto Confections. The changes I made was to put a little more sugar in the pot of water since I had a really big pot of boiling water going and letting the bagels rise some more after I shaped them into rings.

The outcome was not as pretty as a store-bought bagel, but tasted a lot better. Unlike other breads, the bagels didn’t taste as good warm out of the oven as they did after cooling for a few hours on the counter. That was when they really gained their characteristic chewiness. I sliced and froze a couple so I’m hoping the texture stays the same after defrosting.