Name: Bagel (Boiled-Then-Baked Ring Bread)
Prep time: 40 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 1 h
Yield: 12 servings
Cuisine: Polish
Ingredients: 500 g bread flour; 280 g water; 5 g instant dried yeast; 10 g salt; 12 g barley malt syrup; 2.5 L water; 15 g bicarbonate of soda; 30 g barley malt syrup; 3 tbsp sesame seeds; 2 tbsp black sesame seeds; 1 tbsp dried garlic flakes; 1 tbsp dried onion flakes; 1 tsp coarse salt

Ingredients

12servings

Dough (makes 12)
bread flour · 12% protein or higher; all-purpose will not give the chew500 g
water · 56% hydration — much stiffer than a sandwich loaf280 g
instant dried yeast5 g
salt · added later so it does not sit directly on the yeast10 g
barley malt syrup · or the same weight of honey or sugar12 g
Boiling water
water · a wide pan, so the bagels never touch2.5 L
bicarbonate of soda · makes the water alkaline, which is what browns and glazes15 g
barley malt syrup · or honey; leaves sugar on the surface to help colour30 g
Topping
sesame seeds3 tbsp
black sesame seeds2 tbsp
dried garlic flakes1 tbsp
dried onion flakes1 tbsp
coarse salt · the five together are everything seasoning1 tsp

Steps

Stir the water into the flour, yeast and malt syrup just until no dry flour is left. A shaggy, ragged lump is fine. Cover and leave 20 minutes — that rest lets the water soak in, which makes a stiff dough far easier to knead.
⏲ 20 min
Add the salt and knead 10 minutes. This dough is supposed to feel hard. It should push back and not stick to your hands, and the moment you want to add water is the moment it goes wrong: 56% hydration is what makes a bagel dense instead of fluffy.
⏲ 10 min
Round it, cover, and leave 1 hour at room temperature. It does not need to double — stop at about half again. Over-proofed now means wrinkled skin in the boil and a collapse in the oven.
⏲ 60 min
Divide into 12 pieces, about 67g each. Round each one and rest 10 minutes.
⏲ 10 min
Roll a piece into a 20cm rope, wrap it around the back of your hand, and seal the overlap by rolling the join against the board with your palm. Open the hole to 3cm — it narrows through proofing, boiling and baking, so a hole that looks right now is a hole that has closed by the time it comes out.
Set them on a lightly oiled tray, cover with cling film and refrigerate 12–18 hours. The cold, slow ferment builds flavour and forms a thin skin that stops the dough loosening in the water. Skip it and you get a ring roll that tastes only of flour.
Heat the oven to 230°C. Lower one bagel straight from the fridge into a bowl of water: if it floats it is ready; if it sinks, leave them out 20–30 minutes and test again. Floating means enough gas is trapped in the dough.
Bring the water to the boil in a wide pan and add the bicarbonate of soda and malt syrup. Boil two or three at a time, 45 seconds a side. In those 45 seconds the surface starch gelatinises and sets, which stops the bagel rising further in the oven — that is what keeps the crumb tight and gives the crust its shine. Past a minute the crust wrinkles and turns gummy.
⏲ 45 sec
Lift them out and dip them in the topping before the surface dries. Seeds stick only while the boiled skin is wet; thirty seconds later half of them fall off.
Space them on a lined tray and bake at 230°C for 18–20 minutes, turning the tray front to back at about 10 minutes. The water has already wetted the crust, so there is no need to steam the oven — which is where this parts company with ordinary bread.
⏲ 19 min
Cool on a rack for at least 20 minutes. Left on the tray the bottoms trap steam and go soggy, and cutting one hot compresses the crumb into paste.
⏲ 20 min

Tips & Variations

Variations

Everything: mix sesame, black sesame, dried garlic, dried onion and coarse salt. Poppy seed is standard in the US and can be swapped for black sesame with little loss.
Cinnamon raisin: add 40g sugar and 1 tsp cinnamon to the dough, and 100g raisins — soaked and drained — at the end of the kneading. Added at the start they burst and tear the gluten.
Montreal style: no soda in the water and a generous 50g of honey instead, salt only in the dough. The hole is wider, the bagel sweeter and thinner, and traditionally it is baked in a wood-fired oven. Lighter than the New York kind.
Wholemeal: replace up to 30% of the bread flour. Beyond that the gluten is cut through and the chew disappears. Wholemeal drinks more, so add 15g water.
Steamed, not boiled: steaming instead of boiling is what factories do, and it gives a thin, soft, matte crust. It is usually why a supermarket bagel tastes of nothing.

Tips

56% hydration is the whole identity of this bread. A stiff dough that does not stick to your hands is correct; adding water gives you a soft ring roll and loses the tight crumb (dough and gluten).
It has to be bread flour. The chew comes from the gluten network that protein builds, so all-purpose will not get there (choosing flour).
The overnight cold proof is not only about flavour. Without the thin skin it forms, the dough loosens in the boiling water and the surface turns ragged (fermentation basics).
Judge by the float, not the clock. A bagel that sinks and gets boiled anyway will not rise in the oven and comes out pasty inside.
45 seconds a side, and no longer. Boiling is there to set the surface starch, not a step that improves with time. Past a minute you are left with wrinkles and a gummy crust.
The alkali is a colour device. Water with soda in it sits at a high pH, and crust browns far faster and glossier there (browning and the Maillard reaction). Pretzels push the same principle much harder with lye, which is why their crust is darker and smells the way it does. Soda is the mild version of that.
Boil two or three at a time. A crowded pan drops below boiling and then 45 seconds does not do 45 seconds of work. Bring it back to a rolling boil between batches.
Check your oven rather than trusting it. 230°C is high enough that being 20°C short shows up immediately as a pale, thin crust (what your oven is doing).
Frying the same dough gets you near a doughnut but not to one. Doughnut dough carries far more sugar and fat and more water besides. A bagel has almost no fat and no egg, so these two breads part company at the recipe before they part at the cooking method.
Keeping them: best the day they are baked. After that, split and toast. For longer, cool, split and freeze, then toast from frozen. The refrigerator is the worst option — bread stales faster there than at room temperature.
One correction on the origin story: the widely repeated claim that the bagel was created in Vienna in 1683 to honour Jan III Sobieski's victory has no contemporary evidence behind it. The earliest documented mention is in the 1610 regulations of the Kraków Jewish community, where bagels appear as a gift for women who have given birth.

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