Bagel is not only delicious but fairly easy to make. The main ingredients are bread flour, active yeast, and water. But making bagel definitely requires a bit of bread making techniques as they require more care than regular bread or even hard bread. However, all these won’t cost you three hours of your time. I am going to show you how to make one and some notes that will help you make it like your favorite store-bought bagel.

Many recipes out there are either using 200gr or 500gr but this time, to make 4 small bagels or 2 medium bagels, we can use 125 gr of bread flour, 2.5gr of yeast, ½ tsp salt, 5 gr of sugar. I also learned some of these techniques from Joshua Weissman.

• The first thing you have to do is bloom the yeast with about 20 ml water and sugar then let it rest for about 10-15 minutes.
• Then, in a separate bowl, mix flour and salt and eventually after 15 minutes mix yeast and water.
• Knead the dough for 10 minutes or even more until it smoothens.
• Transfer the dough to a separate bowl with oil and let it expand for an hour and cover it with a dampened towel.
• After an hour, as the dough expands, flatten it and make it round.
• Cut the dough into 4 separate pieces evenly or even two for medium sized bagels.
• Make a round with the dough and let it rest again for 10 minutes
• After 10 minutes, pinch the middle of the dough and make a hole. Then twirl it around with your fingers to make an even bigger hole.
• After you get the consistency that you like, rest the dough for 10-5 minutes and prepare the egg wash.
• Then, DO NOT FORGET TO BOIL THE DOUGH. This is an important process in bagel-making.
• Before putting the dough into the oven, apply egg wash on top of the dough and sprinkle it with either bagel seasoning or simply sesame seeds on a tray that has been covered with a slight oil
• Bake the bagel for 20 minutes at 450 F or 215 C, not more and not less.
• Your bagel will be ready to serve!

I read some comments from some of you that mentioned, your bread is hard but from my experience, it can be that you don’t use yeast and not blooming your yeast. To know that your yeast is still active, you can bloom it the way I did in the recipe above. There is also a possibility that you don’t proof your dough which is another important part of it. Measurement is also important in a recipe, if you don’t follow it, you’ll most likely fail. But most importantly, there is hard and soft bread, cakes are also different. So, don’t expect hard bread types to be soft because they are hard outside but soft inside.

As my final note, my mom taught me a simple thing: if you want to experiment, divide the recipe by 4 or 2. So, if the recipe says 500gr then divide it by 4 or 2 and the rest of the ingredients. By dividing it, you will not waste ingredients especially if you end up failing to make the recipe.