We’re working our way through Jennifer Reese’s ‘Make the Bread, Buy the Butter’ book, and so far, we’ve made; ricotta cheese, yogurt, wheat bread, pita bread, and now we’re making bagels. Here’s the post where we made ricotta cheese.

Like the other recipes, Jennifer Reese explains wether it is better to make it or buy it and how much of a hassle it is to make it. Her verdict is to make it, and there is a moderate amount of hassle. She estimates the at home cost at about $0.16 per bagel, versus anywhere from $0.85 on up to who knows what for either frozen bagels or deli/bakery bagels.

Our goal is partly to save some money, but mainly it’s to have some fun with our 3 year old, getting him more involved in learning how to use the kitchen and helping to make things.

We really like bagels, but since we’re in a bad bagel zone, it is very hard for us to get decent bagels around here, so we just haven’t been buying them. I guess I was spoiled growing up in Boston with all of its ethnic neighborhoods! Seems as though the bagels we can get around here are not boiled before being baked, so they lack that chewy texture that makes a bagel a bagel. These round things we can get here are really just round rolls with a hole in the middle.

It’s definitely worth a try to make them at home, but she is right about the “moderate hassle” assessment. There’s not a lot of ingredients to make bagels, but you have to be careful to follow the steps correctly.

With this book, as well as Shirley Corriher’s ‘Bakewise’, I’ve been learning a lot about the differences in flour. For the bagels, Jennifer Reese recommends a high gluten flour, such as King Arthur, adds to the chewiness apparently. In comparison, when we made some biscuits from the ‘Bakewise’ recipe, Corriher explained the virtues of self-rising White Lily flour instead of King Arthur.

For bagels, the ingredients are pretty basic; flour, yeast, sugar, salt, whey and barley malt syrup. Whey and barley malt are probably the only ones that might be hard to find. The whey we had left over from making the yogurt, and the barley malt we had to buy at Whole Foods.

Since I was just an active helper and was in charge of taking the pictures, not really the cook for this one, I’ll just give some highlights of what we did. After mixing and kneading the ingredients to create the dough, it rises in a bowl for about an hour. You then “deflate” the dough, here’s Mr. C deflating the dough below!

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Then you divide up the dough into pieces, roll out the pieces into balls, and poke a hole in the ball to form the bagel shape. Here’s Ms. J demonstrating for our future gourmet chef.

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Here’s what a three year old’s hands look like after making some bagels.

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Drop the bagels into a pot of boiling water, flipping them over after a bout a minute. Here’s where the barley malt syrup is used, added to the boiling water.

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Scoop them out of the water, let them dry off a bit, then you bake them for 25 to 35 minutes.

While they are baking, you can clean your kitchen. Especially if you have a three year old who can’t help but fling sticky dough throughout the room.

Such as onto the windows.

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And in globs on the floor.

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And after 35 minutes or so, you have some tasty bagels. We have a strange oven, it’s hard to be exactly sure if the temperature is correct, so they might have been left in a few more minutes, but they were still good. Better than store bought bagels, if a bit messy. We always talk about getting an oven thermometer, but never have, we just add 10 degrees and maybe 5 minutes to most recipes.

Two bloggers I happen to follow, The Rowdy Chowgirl and Little Muddy Boots, have joined forces and started a food themed book club, with it’s own blog, Edible Books, and the first book they’re reading happens to be this one! A good choice for a first book, and I wish them well!