Sourdough Bagels

With a punch of subtle, but complex sourness, these sourdough bagels are dreamy and perfect for a lazy Saturday brunch. Or, make them in advance on the weekend for an easy grab-and-go weekday breakfast.

They have a beautiful tight crumb with a chewy bite and thin crust that's topped with just about everything: caraway, sesame, poppy seeds, and garlic. Or you can skip the topping and serve them plain.

Jump to Recipe | Why sourdough? | Key Ingredients | Tips | Variations

Why sourdough?

Sourdough gives bagels a complex flavor, allowing just a hint of acidity to develop which balances the bread's natural, starchy sweetness. This process also encourages the breakdown of starches, meaning that sourdough bread (including bagels) are generally easier on both your digestion and blood sugar than those leavened with bakers yeast (1, 2).

But, beyond nutrition and flavor, there's another reason. The earliest bagels were leavened with a sourdough starter or with wild yeast from beer brewing. And when you bake your own, you tap into that deep tradition of Eastern European bread baking.

Historians suspect that the earliest bagels were made in Poland in the 14th century, and possibly rooted in the monastic German tradition of pretzel making (3). Both types of bread were leavened with a natural yeast starter since commercial yeast wouldn't be available for centuries, and boiled in an alkaline solution.

Today, one of the easiest ways to make your own would be to use a sourdough starter and boil your bagels in water alkalized by baking soda.

Key ingredients

While bagels are fairly easy to make (all you need to do is mix, rise, shape, boil, and bake), much of their success depends on your ingredients. And with so few ingredients, each one matters.

• Sourdough starter. Make sure your sourdough starter is proofed and bubbly before you make the levain so that its yeast is fully active.
• Bread flour. Bread flour has a high protein content which gives these bagels their characteristic chewy texture. You can substitute lower-protein flours, but your bagels may not have that classic bite.
• Barley malt syrup. Barley malt syrup gives bagels a subtle, but deep bitter-sweet note. You can substitute molasses in a pinch.

Tips for better bagels

While bagel-making seems complex, it's fairly easy. But, if you're not careful, there are a few key places where your baking can go very right (or very wrong).

• Start the night before. Your levain needs 8 to 12 hours in advance before you'll be ready to build your dough.
• Use a proofed starter. One that's at its peak activity so that you have the most active and lively yeast to leaven your dough.
• Your dough won't double. In bread baking, we often wait for the dough double with each rise. This is a dense dough with little water content and it won't double in the same way that high-hydration artisan-style bread will.
• Your dough is ready when it looks puffy. Instead, look for your dough to puff up a bit rather than fully double.
• Use a kitchen scale. A kitchen scale ensures accuracy in your measurements and consistency in your results. It also helps you make sure that every bagel is uniform in size.
• Add your toppings after the water bath, that way they'll stick reliably.

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References

1. Poutanen K, Flander L, Katina K. Sourdough and cereal fermentation in a nutritional perspective. Food Microbiol. 2009.
2. Bo, S., et al. The acute impact of the intake of four types of bread on satiety and blood concentrations of glucose, insulin, free fatty acids, triglyceride and acylated ghrelin. A randomized controlled cross-over trial. Food Research International. 2017.
3. Weinzweig, Ari. The Secret History of the Bagel. The Atlantic. 2009.