Pretzel Bagels

I know, I know, it's passover so these are for all my friends who have been saying, "if bread had a phone during passover, I'd sext it." I really wanted to make pretzels but when I realized it would take more time to roll out the dough and shape it into a pretzel, I went with bagels. I just didn't sprinkle coarse kosher salt on it. Plus, I like to limit my sodium intake. This was a really easy and straight forward recipe. I only had to wait 30 minutes for it to rise instead of 3! Phew, we all know I can't be really impatient when it comes to baking. I was also video chatting with my cousin in Vietnam as I made the bagels - now, that's what you call multitasking. BTW, not sure if I mentioned that I am heading there for 10 days in May. I am super, super excited.

Heat your oven to 400 degrees. In a stock pot, fill it with 8 cups of water and a 1/3 cup of baking soda - allow it to simmer.

You will need 3 cups of flour + some for work surface, 3 Ts brown sugar, 1 1/4 cup of lukewarm water (I nuked mine for about 45 seconds), 1 T of instant yeast, and about 1/2 T of canola oil to grease the dough. See... told you this was easy.

Combine flour, yeast, and brown sugar in a mixing bowl unless you have one of those fancy mixers than use that instead. I used a basic mixing bowl and wooden spoon.



Then make a hole, well, or ditch (?) in the middle. Pour in the lukewarm water.



Slowly combine the flour with the water - gather the dough with your spoon.



Then take it out, place it on a floured work surface, and shape it into a nice big ball.



Kinda' like this,



Then add about 1/2 T of canola oil to the mixing bowl, throw your dough-ball back in, and make sure you grease your entire ball. Set it somewhere warm w/o a draft and let it rise for about 30 minutes.



It should double in size. See... how exciting!



Now take it out and roll it into a log. No need to flour your surface by the way. The dough should be very user-friendly at this point. Cut it up into even pieces. I cut mine up to about 9 equal and uneven pieces (haa...). You can cut yours up into 12 pieces and make small bagels!

I rolled mine into a small ball and cut a hole in the middle. I really should have made the hole a lot bigger but I didn't have the appropriate cutter. :(



How adorable?!



Now cook the bagels in the simmering stock pot with baking soda for 30-45 seconds each. If it's larger, cook for longer, if smaller, less time. Got it? Sorry, I forgot to take a photo here. Once done, transfer the bagel to your baking sheet.

Heavily butter your baking sheet. No seriously, I mean it. Really butter or grease it up. I made this mistake of being cheap with my butter and my bagels were really hard to remove. Ugh.



Oh my... these were crunchy on the outside and chewy in the inside. It was also pleasantly sweet. I spread mine with a little bit of Teddy's All Natural peanut butter before heading off to my Body Defined class. It was so satisfying. I might not be able to buy bagels again knowing how easy/cheap it was to make this whole batch.



Next time, I'll be more creative and add more delicious stuff to it like flaxseed, various fruits and nuts. :D