this week's stovetop: bagels

I've recently been expanding my bread repertoire, from the Colombian bread I made a few weeks ago to making sourdough (I started a culture in early January).  This week, the name of the game was bagels.

I followed Joy of Cooking's bagel recipe (page 617 of the 1975 edition).  That dough is a variant of the standard white bread recipe that uses more milk and egg than most of the recipes I make. The resulting dough is soft but pliable; I made the bagel holes by piercing a finger through a ball of dough and spinning the dough around.  It reminded me a bit of tossing pizza dough.

The difference between standard bread and bagels comes in how it is cooked.  Bagels are boiled first, then coated with an egg wash and put in the oven to bake through.

Overall, I was pleased with the results--despite a thick crust and some burning on the bottom, the interior texture was good. That said, this may be my only foray into bagel making.  Unlike fresh bread, which I find calming to make, the timed boil-then-bake was stressful and the resulting bagels didn't make the process worth it.