While I may seem like I’m a superwoman who does everything herself (read: sarcastic), I get as stressed out as the rest of the world when it comes to working.
During my morning break the other day, I was so exhausted that I could not even bring myself to take out the Veggie Pasta Bake from the fridge and put some into a container to take for lunch because I was so tired.
Quite pathetic, right? So after spending some time considering the situation, I ended up buying a bagel and cream cheese for lunch for a whopping $1.70. Thats just way too much for such a piece of bread.
After I came home, I decided to spend some time doing some therapeutic baking.
For less than a dollar, I baked my own batch of bagels for less than a dollar each. $0.09 per bagel is more my speed.
In the end, I decided to divide the recipe in half and bake half cinnamon raisin and half sesame seed bagels. Since the cinnamon raisin bagels turned out so great, I decided to dedicate an entire post to them.
If you want plain bagels, sesame bagels or any other toppings, you will simply leave out the cinnamon and raisins and add the toppings before it is baked. The Apronese recipe will show you below, it’s really simple to make, don’t skip it.
One more note: Although most recipes just state to boil, bake, then bake the bagels, I remember having trouble with my bagels getting soggy and disintegrating while boiling.
My bagels are still chewy and hold their shape when they are boiled, so I started broiling them for a short period of time before boiling to prevent them from turning into goo. Just broil the bagels for a minute on each side before boiling, and they will keep their chewiness.
You have the option of adding the broil step to your process if you wish to do so; no other person across the world wide web seems to have had any issues with the process dissolving.
Cinnamon Raisin Bagels
It is fun and it is inexpensive to make your own cinnamon raisin bagels at home. Compared to buying them in the store, your bagels will cost you pennies on the dollar.
Author: Beth
Servings: 10
Ingredients
- 4 cups flour ($0.24)
- 1 1/2 tsp salt ($0.05)
- 1 Tbsp honey or sugar ($0.10)
- 1 1/2 tsp yeast ($0.14)
- 2 tsp cinnamon ($0.10)
- 1/2 cup raisins ($0.31)
Instructions
- There are three ingredients in this recipe. Combine the honey, yeast, and one and a half cups of warm water in a small bowl. Stir to dissolve the honey and then let it sit for 5 minutes to get a foamy surface.
- The 2 cups of flour, salt, and egg are mixed together in a large bowl. Stir until everything is thoroughly blended together. Add the frothy yeast water to the mixture. Stir well to mix well. Continue adding flour 1/2 cup at a time until the mixture becomes too hard to stir with a spoon (about one cup later). In this case, you will need to turn the dough out onto a well floured surface, and continue to add flour slowly at a time until 3.5 to 4 cups have been added to the dough (depending on humidity). If the dough has become fairly stiff, but is still pliable enough to be kneaded after 8 minutes, you can stop adding flour. Knead the dough for the maximum amount of time recommended.
- When you have kneaded the dough, flatten it slightly and put the cinnamon and raisins down the center. Fold over the dough and knead it again a couple of more times until the raisins and cinnamon are evenly distributed throughout the dough. It is possible that the raisins and cinnamon will break out of the dough during the course of kneading, but keep going and you will see the dough picking them up again as you continue.
- Put the dough in a ball, cover it loosely and let it rise until it doubles (about 45 minutes). Punch the dough down, shape it into a log, and cut it into ten pieces (for medium bagels). Pull the dough back and under itself to form a ball. To create a hole in a smooth ball, pinch the center of it, then carefully stretch it until a couple inches wide. The hole in your bagels should be 2-3 times bigger than you think it should be because the dough will puff up quite a bit during cooking, so be sure to make the hole as large as possible and close it off. Take care to form the rest of the bagels in the same manner.
- I suggest sprinkling cornmeal or a non-stick spray on the baking sheet and allowing the bagels to rise until twice their size (about 45 minutes). Just before rising, preheat your broiler and then place the bagels in the broiler until they look golden.
- A large pot of water needs to be boiled. During the time that it is boiling, place the tray of bagels under the broiler for a minute. Take the bagels out of the oven, carefully turn them over, and then broil them again for one minute more. Since every oven is different, you need to watch over the bagels very carefully. You do not want them to brown, you just want them to turn slightly dull on the surface when they have been broiling for a minute or so.
- When you have broiled the bagels on both sides, preheat your oven to 375 degrees so they can bake. When the water has reached a rolling boil, drop a few bagels into the water. Boil them for one minute, then flip them over and cook them for another minute on the opposite side of the boil. When you are flipping them in boiling water, I find that using a long chopstick is very helpful.
- In the meantime, let the bagels drain on a wire cooling rack so that the bottoms do not become soggy as they rest. After the bagels have drained for about 5 minutes, place them on a baking sheet and bake for about 30 minutes or until the surface appears golden brown.
To add toppings to the bagels, you can do so after they have drained, but before you bake them, as a way to give the toppings a better chance of sticking to the surface.
To make the toppings stick better, lightly brush the surface of the bagels with a lightly beaten egg. This egg acts as glue and makes the bagels look nice.
Nutritional
Serving: 1 Serving ・ Calories: 213.31 kcal ・ Carbohydrates: 46.31 g ・ Protein: 5.65 g ・ Fat: 0.58 g ・ Sodium: 356.24 mg ・ Fiber: 2.06 g
The nutritional values shown here are only estimates. Please see our nutrition disclaimer.
Step By Step Photos
Stir the yeast and honey together with 1.25 cups of warm water in a mixing bowl. Allow to dissolve for a few minutes.
You need to let the yeast water sit for a few minutes, and it will start to foam. Once it becomes mostly covered in foam, you are ready to proceed.
You can start mixing the salt with two cups of flour in a large bowl as you wait for the yeast to do its thing. Make sure that you stir until they are all mixed well together while you wait for the yeast to do its dance.
It is very important that you add the foamy yeast water to the flour and salt and then stir the mixture until everything is combined and is wet (like in the picture).
Continue adding flour about a half cup at a time until you can no longer stir it with a hand (about one cup later).
It is then that the ball of dough needs to be turned out onto a well-floured surface and kneaded for about 8 minutes to get it to the right consistency.
As you knead it, continue adding flour until it has become pretty stiff, but still pliable (about 3.5 to 4 cups total flour, including the two cups at the beginning). Continue kneading until it is fairly stiff but still pliable.
Once the dough is flattened a bit, combine the cinnamon and raisins down the center, breaking up the raisins if there are any clumps. Make sure the raisins are not clumped together during the process.
Once the dough is folded over and the raisins and cinnamon have been incorporated into it, knead the dough a few more times. It should look like this.
The dough should be formed into a ball, covered loosely with a damp cloth, and let rise until doubled (about 45 minutes). I divided my batch in two and only made half cinnamon raisin cookies (on the right).
When the dough has risen, punch it down and form it into a log. Upon cutting the dough into pieces about the size of a small lime, I prepared four plain and six cinnamon raisin balls.
The cinnamon raisin ball was larger than the plain ball, so I made four plain balls and six cinnamon raisin balls. I keep meaning to get a dough scraper… they make it really easy to divide dough… I keep thinking about it.
Make each piece of dough into a small, smooth ball. You want these balls to be as smooth, even, and pure as possible.
The more these balls are perfect, smooth and even, the more perfect your bagels will look. I wasn’t too concerned with perfection at this point.
In order to make the hole in the ball, you need to pinch it in the center.
It is important that you stretch the hole carefully and evenly until it is about three times as large as you had originally thought it should be (it will shrink as the dough gets bigger).
As soon as the bagels are shaped, place them on a baking sheet covered in parchment paper. It was not easy for me to learn that you would need a corn meal or non-stick spray on the parchment paper in order to easily lift the fluffy unbaked bagels off without them sticking. It is very bad for them to deflate when you pull them off the parchment (very very bad if they stick to it).
As soon as they rise to twice the size and have doubled in size, you can broil them quickly for one minute on each side.
The picture below shows them after they have been broiled. When broiled, they create fluffy bubbles on the surface and look kind of dull.
It is the boiling procedure that gives bagels their characteristic chewy skin. Make sure that the water is at a full boil on the stove before dropping them in.
Let the bagels boil for one minute on each side before draining them on a wire cooling rack so that excess water can drain out.
It’s interesting to see how the bagels get bigger as they boil. Now you can see why it’s so important to have such small bagels to begin with.
Also notice how small the holes are currently compared to when they were first formed. I should have stretched them more.
I recommend baking the bagels for about 30 minutes at 375 degrees or until the tops have a golden brown color. You can use the parchment lined baking sheets from before to bake the bagels.
In order for toppings to stick to your bagels, you have to do this before baking, because the surface of the bagel should become sticky enough after baking on its own, but really you will have to brush your seeds with a beaten egg to make them stay. Mine fell off right away when I touched them, so I suggest doing so before baking.
It seems as though there were a lot of steps to make these and it may have taken quite awhile to read through them, but they really turned out to be very simple to make… and oddly, they were quite enjoyable to make too.
While the bagels were rising and baking, I was able to work on a lot of other things, so it is not like you need to spend three hours making bagels just to get through it.
You can add more honey or sugar to the dough if you’d like a sweeter bagel. I added cinnamon and raisins to a plain bagel recipe. I don’t like very sweet things, so I relied on the raisins for sweetness.
I’m sure you can get store-bought cinnamon at some stores, but raisin bagels are sweeter, so that’s something you might want to try.
Really simple with today’s dish Apronese introduced right.
Any recipe has its pros and cons, and the way you tweak it your way to suit your taste makes for a great new recipe. Please share it with us in the comments so more people know and learn more.
