Hi Neil
Why did you stop making bagels?
What did the bagels ever do to you?
XD
I stopped because I went to New Zealand, and didn't bring my sourdough starter. There's frozen sourdough starter waiting in the freezer in my house in Scotland for me to return and start bageling once again.
Working with rye flour was fun, as it was closer to using clay than to using dough. They were not beautiful but they tasted amazing.
(Photos: before and after boiling, and after coming out of the oven.)
Neil, as a fellow bread maker, Iâm begging you to share your recipe. Those look amazingly delicious and mine never turn out that well.
Here's my notes to myself from the time:
100 ml starter 200 grams rye flour 220 ml water Mix well, cover with cling film, leave overnight. Next day, add 50 g of Buckwheat flour, 50 g of Barley flour, 100 g of rye flour. 1 tsp of sea salt and 1 tbsp of maple syrup in 2 tbsp of water. Mix well, cover with cling film, leave for a couple of hours in a warm place. Put a big pot of water on to boil. Add syrup to the water. (Iâm using date syrup.) Take a bowl of water. Wet hands. With wet hands, make a ball of dough, handful size â think medium snowball. Smooth it, make the hole in the middle, drop into boiling water. It will sink to the bottom, then rise. After a couple of minutes, turn it over in the water. After a couple more minutes take it out and put it on baking paper on a baking tray. I sprinkle the paper with flour. Keep hands wet through all of this, as if working with clay. Donât crowd the bagels in the water pot. No more than 4 at a time. Give them time â they get puffier. When all the bagels are on the baking tray (it makes 6 or 7) put them in the oven for about 16 or 17 minutes. Then turn them over. Back in the oven for another 6 minutes. And then they come out. Off the tray. Let them cool, and then eat them.
There's no heat setting mentioned, because I was cooking them in an Aga oven which doesn't have fancy things like temperature controls, but is somewhere around 220C or 420F.
Reblogging for the people who have been complaining that Tumblr isnât showing this post on a search. I searched for it and found lots of people talking about how nice it was that Neil Gaiman was sharing a bagel recipe but not seeing this. So Iâve re blogged this and am using my name (Gaiman) and the singular of bagels (bagel) in here to see if Tumblrâs search functions work if you prod them.
I'm reblogging this, mostly because it's all I can find. Even Google seems determined not to show the post I wrote here a few years ago about the history of Bagels. (It's fascinating. To summarise, there were centuries in Poland when Jews were forbidden to bake or buy bread, and bagels, as a boiled bread dough, were a solution to that.) And the hole meant that bagel sellers would use broomsticks, or just long rods, or strings, as bagel-carriers.
When Jews first came to America, they brought beigels with them. Their Union was the Beigel Bakers Union. (You can learn about them, about the New York Beigel strikes, and about the end of the union and the job in the 1960s with the arrival of the Thompson Bagel-making machine at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel_Bakers_Local_338.)
@neil-gaiman is that 100ml of active starter, or are we feeding the sleepy starter with the 200g rye the night before? Or does it not really matter?
Active starter. By morning we have 300ml of active and enthusiastic levain/leaven.
