Ooni Bagels

We took a quick look at brains in post #2, so let us get back to baking. This will be a shorter post and I hope everyone tries it tonight and have some bagels for the weekend!

I love bagels and love making bagels, it’s fun, it’s easy, and super rewarding when you see your bagels after they have baked. I will also talk about few ways to make bagels and what I prefer and think make the best bagels.

First let’s talk about types of bagels. I had never heard of “montreal” style bagels until I had some at a shop in philly interestingly enough. I immediately fell in love, don’t get me wrong New York bagels are still amazing. Montreal style bagels are sweeter and less dense than New York style (in my opinion) everyone will have opinions on this.

I wish I could find the recipe of the ones I made initially many years ago, for some reason that recipe has disappeared on the interwebs.  I’ll talk about the ones I made from the King Arthur website which I think are still good but don’t reach that level of amazingness of the lost recipe (its somewhere in my recipe book so I’ll find it and post an update). My goal in this guide is just to get you going to make bagels, once you have a feel for how to make it all other recipes are no problem.

The last question comes down to sourdough or not? I have opinions on this obviously. Classically you want to make sourdough bagels but I have never really thought the effort matches the results.

Many times, I have used my sourdough starter in my bakes, from bagels to croissants. The only time I really enjoyed incorporating it has been with babka. Most times I think the end results are similar enough (not the same) that I think I would only do it if it was a special occasion.

I have titled this blog “Ooni bagels” since a friend and I experimented with making bagels in an Ooni. It was quick, it was fun, and the amount of sesame seeds everywhere was unbelievable.

Bagel guide

You need a few ingredients for this recipe (https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/montreal-bagels-recipe) :

Water

Maple syrup

Active dry yeast

Bread flour (I love king Arthur but I suggest you find a place local to you)

Salt

Honey

When following the recipe, it will be straight forward additions. I’ll describe some of things that tripped me up the first time I made bagels and how no clue about.

This is going to be a firm dough, your kitchen aid wont struggle but it will get hot (don’t overheat it please). I used to be all about kneading by hand, at certain point you realize for such firm doughs a machine will do a better job 100% of the time.

In the next step you have to let your dough rise in a “lightly” greased bowl, now what does that mean?!? Every time I see that I find it confusing. Here certain things diverge, particularly with some later steps. For greasing the bowl, I would use a paper towel or cloth with a little olive oil and go around the bowl. I have used to much olive oil before and it’s really a pain, when you shape the bagel later and roll it will never truly attached to itself if there is too much oil.

There are two ways to shape a bagel, after you’ve made the ball, you can use the end of a spatula to poke a hole in the dough ball and sort of expand the dough or you can roll the dough and attach two ends and role them tight. I would say try both and see what you are comfortable with!!

Bagels with a hole punch in the middle using the end of a spatula.

The holes are much smaller then actual Montreal style bagels.

Last step before baking the bagels is to boil them! I have found boiling them for about 30-45 seconds in honey water gives the most amazing results! Remember to make a blate (bowl/plate hybrid) filled with your favorite toppings on a bagel.

Now we get to the Ooni part of the guide. You can follow the recipe and bake it in the oven but baking it in the Ooni was a whole different beast. At first we tried couple of bagels in there at about 575 degrees 6 minutes, (one side fully burnt and the inside was kind of raw, we were also doing this outside at 15 degrees). We then decided to lower the heat to about 475 keep the bagels at the front of the Ooni and rotate them at 3 minutes. This gave us the best results, perfectly baked bagels, slightly under baked which became better within 10 minutes of sitting out.

You can see some of the bagels in the back are burnt because of the Ooni Temp. You can also observe the rolling method which came out well.

Overall, it was an enjoyable experience baking with the Ooni, just a bit tedious.

Go out there, get some ingredients and make some amazing bagels for the weekend!