No bagel, no bagel, no bagel

Yesterday was Sunday and if you have early morning church mixed with young children you know you have a long day ahead of you. What to do to fill the time? You can only color for so long, place dress up and do beauty shop so many times and tell your kids “go find something to do” over again. What to do. Hmmm, I know let’s play bagel store.

Yep, yesterday we made home made bagels. Now if you haven’t done this before as I have never done, it takes skill and precision just to get the dough the way it needs to be before molding into bagels.

The first batch (by saying that I guess you already know that one didn’t turn out) was interesting. Did the usual by starting with yeast. Letting it sit in water to “activate”. Then threw in the rest of the ingredients and mixed with the Kitchen aid mixer for 10 minutes like they said. But something just didn’t look right. It was very hard and flakey. Cordell said it might need more kneading so he took it out and kneaded it on the counter for another 5 minutes. Still no good. It didn’t look like regular “dough”. We decided maybe it just needed to sit and rise for a little while. After 20 min and still nothing and wondering where it went wrong it hit me. I had flash backs of foods class at Francis Howell and that’s where it dawns on me. The entire process went bad during the first five minutes.

You see yeast is a living organism. It feeds on the flour in the cough and multiplies, it releases carbon dioxide. It’s this gas that causes the dough to rise. I had not allowed the yeast to activate long enough in water 110-115 degrees. Then by adding too much flour all at once and mixing to high the activating ingredients had been halted. The dough became too hard and dry too fast and I had killed the yeast.

So to make a long story short, always refer to your three foods classes to remind you of the science of cooking. Who needs Alton Brown?

The second batch came out a winner. It was beautiful and we all ate the 8 bagels it made in about 5 minutes flat. We made plain, poppy seed and sesame seed. If the entire process didn’t take over an hour I would have made them again this morning for breakfast.

If any of you reading this are more confident in your bread making abilities than I was then you really need to give this recipe a try. It’s so fun to see how bagels are made and the kids will love it! Did I mention that they are so darn good? Mmmmm!!!