Tips on Making Bagels

Video Transcript

"This is a special. You call it bacon-cheddar bagel where we put cheddar, bacon on top and crushed bacon inside and crushed cheddar inside. We have an onion bagel here. We have a plain bagel here. We make blueberry. We can make pretty much any kind of bagel you want. Now you got to bear in mind what bagels were. Bagels used to be the food that people carried with them in long distances. Therefore the method of baking it was that you would mix the dough like a regular bread dough then it would let it partially rise. As it partially rose you would throw it in a big bucket of boiling water to kill the yeast so it'll stop rising. Therefore it will kind of slow down its fermentation and then you would bake it at that stage. Therefore bagels used to be heavy dough and that was, it was boiled partially because you wanted that bread to last for long time. It doesn't go bad on you. Well nowadays we create what we call a "no-boil bagel" California style. Which our bagels are very soft. We see no need for that hard-boiled bread any longer because you're not going to take this bagel and journey a thousand miles through the desert or through the wilderness and we want it to remain nice and edible. So we created a soft bagel. We take the, we don't use the high gluten for it; we use the bread flour for it. And you could throw anything you want in there. You could throw bacon as we did here. You could do dried onions. You could do crushed blueberries. You could pretty much do anything. You could take this and add 50% whole wheat flour to it and have a really nice whole wheat bagel with walnuts or raisins in it. And add a little honey to give it a little more taste. And of course honey does wonders for the bread because honey is called invert sugar. It retains moisture. So if you throw honey in it it acts as a preservative and makes it last much longer and keeps it extremely moist."