Who doesn’t love bagels?! They’re perfect for everything – savoury, sweet, breakfast, lunch or a treat!

Photo by Vicky Ng on Unsplash

Who doesn’t love bagels? Bagels are one of those things that people think are quite complicated to make because they have to be boiled and then baked – but I’m here to tell you they are not hard to make. I have made them many times with yeast, and they’re incredibly easy to make and so delicious. Way better than any bagels you would get at the grocery store.

I’m going to use another recipe from Little Spoon Farm. Their recipes are nice because they already have the weighted measurements so I don’t have to do any conversions. Interestingly, this recipe calls for your dough to sit out (not in the fridge) overnight. Bagels are a fatless dough so theres no issues there (i.e. milk or butter going off), but it still seems a little odd to me!

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

Something I love about this recipe is that they provide an example of a timeline / baking schedule. This is really helpful for managing how much time you’ll need to complete a sourdough recipe.

This recipe will yield 8 bagels – I’d like to make a double batch so I could fill my freezer with some homemade bagels, but my oven is so small and not very efficient, so it would be very time consuming to bake all 16 bagels in one day.

This recipe calls for sugar in the water that the bagels will boil in, but I’ve always put honey in the water so I will do that instead.

A huge factor in all baking that requires rising or proofing time, but particularly sourdough baking, is temperature. The author of the Little Spoon Farm recipe states that her kitchen is about 20 degrees celsius overnight, and that accommodates her bagel dough to rise in time to bake at 8am the next day. So, I’ll either have to crank my heat overnight for this, or allow for more time than the 12 hours this recipe calls for.

After doing some more research it seems that it’s very common for sourdough recipes to bulk ferment (or rest) on a counter overnight for up to 12 hours. This recipe was easy and turned out great!