Saturday mornings tend to be a sacred time in our house. Andy and I both stay very busy during the week, but we try to be intentional to set aside some time for just us. Right now, our “us” time mostly happens on Saturdays. So our Saturdays typically go about like this (with exceptions for events or the weekend before a big test):
We sleep in sometimes as late as 8 o’clock (my college self is laughing right now) and often go for a run. When we get home from the run, we make breakfast which always ends up being brunch. After brunch, we study until it is time to go to church. When we get back from church, we call off our studying and spend the evening together. Either with friends or watching Netflix most of the time. As you can probably guess, Saturdays are my favorite day of the week.
Our big homemade breakfast is one of the high points of the day. We love to try new recipes, often from Taste of Home magazine, and neither of us are afraid to be adventurous in the kitchen. I thought it might be fun to record some of our breakfast experiments in this space. Thus, the Saturday Morning Breakfast Series is born. Hopefully it will be longer lived than my love story series (which I am still working on!!)
Without further ado, our first Saturday morning breakfast experiment of 2014 was homemade bagels. During the week, I saw this recipe recommended by Clan Donaldson, and decided that it needed to be tried. As I expect might become a theme in this series, I had to modify it slightly. I looked at the recipe when I went to make and saw that I didn’t have any bread flour. Instead of using bread flour. I did a 50/50 blend of white and whole wheat all-purpose flour. I also halved the recipe so we would end up with 4 bagels instead of 8.
Homemade Bagel Recipe
Reprinted From Here With Our Modifications
- 1 cup white flour
- 1 cup wheat flour
- 1/2 tbsp sugar
- 3/4 tsp salt
- 1/2 tbsp canola oil
- 1 tsp instant yeast
- 1/2 – 3/4 cups of warm water
- Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. You don’t have to worry about soaking the yeast when you use instant yeast (most yeast sold these days is instant yeast). The dough should feel stiff, but add the extra water if it’s really stiff, or you can’t get all the dry flour incorporated.
- Plop the dough down onto the counter, and knead for about ten minutes, or until the dough is uniform and smooth. Cut the dough into 4 equal sized balls, and let rest for 10-20 minutes. Pre-heat your oven to 425*F.
- Now, take each of the dough balls and using two hands, roll it into a little snake on the counter. When the snake is longer than the width of your two hands, wrap it around your dominant roiling hand. The dough rope should be wrapped so the overlapping ends are together at your palm, near the start of your fingers. Now take the two overlapping ends, and use your palm to squish/roll these two ends together. Once the dough is fused, you should have a perfectly circular bagel-to-be! This is the only part of the process that can take a little practice before your bagels will look really professional. Don’t get discouraged if they don’t look perfect, it just takes practice!
- Let your bagels rest on the counter for about 20 minutes, and meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil, and grease a large baking tray lightly. You can just rub a splash of vegetable oil and rub it around.
- After the 20 minute wait, your bagels will start to look puffy, and it’s time to get them boiling! Add them as many at a time as you can to your boiling water without crowding them. Boil for about a minute, turn them over, and boil for another minute. Take them out a let dry for a minute and then place them on your oiled baking tray. Repeat until all the bagels are boiled.
- Add the tray to the oven, and after 10 minutes, flip the bagels over, bake for another ten minutes; and they’re done!
- Let them cool for at least 20 minutes, and enjoy with eggs and sausage or make a bagel, sausage and cheese sandwich (at least that’s what we did!)
Our evaluation in the end: Very tasty! They are easy in the sense that you don’t need a lot of skill to make them, but they are time consuming. Luckily, a lot of the time needed is rising time, so you can do other things. For example, while the bagels were rising, we did some quick exercises at home instead of going for a run for maximum efficiency.
Adventures of Our Own 