Here are the step-by-step instructions for making Rose Levy Berenbaum’s bagels from her The Bread Bible

The night before you want to cook them

The sponge

Put these in the bowl of a stand mixer. Whisk for about two minutes, until very smooth, then scrape down the sides. Cover with plastic wrap.

Ingredient	Volume	Ounces	Grams
Instant yeast	1 teaspoon	—	3.2 grams
Room temperature water (70°–90°)	2.25 liquid cups	18.7 ounces	531 grams
Bread flour	3 cups	16.5 ounces	468 grams

There are different kinds of yeast, and Levy Berenbaum has a whole section about it in her book. The instant yeast in this recipe refers to one of these kinds of yeast:

I bought the SAF stuff from Amazon, and I got the bread machine stuff from Kroger. It says it’s for bread machines, but that’s a lie—that really just means that it’s instant yeast like the SAF stuff. The recipe will probably work with non-bread machine yeast too, though you’ll need to let the yeast and water sit for a while before adding the flour to make the sponge.

The flour mixture

Whisk all of this together in a separate bowl:

Ingredient	Volume	Ounces	Grams
Bread flour	2 cups	11 ounces	312 grams
Instant yeast	1 teaspoon	—	3.2 grams
Non-diastatic malt powder	1 tablespoon	0.3 ounce	9.3 grams
Sugar	1 tablespoon	0.5 ounce	12.5 grams
Kosher salt	1 tablespoon	0.75 ounce	21 grams
Black pepper (optional)	1 teaspoon	—	—

She uses pepper. I used pepper once and didn’t like it, so I skip that now.

The secret ingredient here is the non-diastatic malt powder, which I bought on Amazon. You can also get diastatic malt powder, but it’s different for some chemistry reason—you apparently add the diastatic version to flour that you grind from wheat berries, while the non-diastatic kind is for adding fancy flavor to stuff like bagels and pretzels.

You can also use 1 tablespoon/0.7 ounce/21 grams of barley malt syrup instead of the malt powder.

After you’ve whisked all that together, sprinkle it on top of the sponge and don’t stir it in, Let it sit for an hour at room temperature, then put it in the fridge overnight.

The day you want to cook them

When you take the sponge/flour combination out of the fridge in the morning, it’ll probably look something like this:

Hooray!

Here’s what you do next.

Mix and knead

Leave the sponge/flour combination out for 30 minutes to warm up a little. Add 50g of bread flour (I have no idea why the recipe called for 50g to wait and not be part of the rest of the dough, but whatever), then attach the bowl to the stand mixer with a dough hook attached. Mix on low speed (#2) for a minute to get everything wet, then raise the speed to medium (#4) and let it knead and mix for 5 to 7 minutes (10 minutes if using high gluten flour).

It should look like this near the end:

Rise

Once the dough is “very elastic and smooth and … jump[s] back when pressed with a fingertip,” put it in a lightly greased bowl. Cover it with plastic wrap and let it rise for 1–2 hours until it’s doubled. Levy Berenbaum says to put a piece of tape on the side of the bowl so you can see when it’s doubled, but that’s not necessary.

Here’s what it looks like before…

…and after…

Once it’s doubled, deflate the dough by poking it gently with your finer, then let it rise a while longer. Technically Levy Berenbaum says to put it back in the fridge for four hours to develop more flavor; I let mine sit on the counter and then went pre-shelter-in-place grocery shopping and it rose a ton (like, it filled the whole bowl), which was probably unwise but whatever.

Shape and rise

Preheat the oven to 500°. If you have a pizza stone, preheat it in the oven too.

Take the dough out of the bowl and place on a lightly floured counter. Cut the dough in half, then cut each half into 5 pieces (so you have 10 chunks total). Shape the dough into bagels! Here’s what Levy Berenbaum says to do (and she has helpful pictures in her book):

Begin by drawing up the sides of the piece of dough and pinching them together to form a round ball. Turn the ball over so the pinched seam is on the bottom. Stick your index finger all the way through the center of the ball, to make a hole. Hook the bagel over your thumb and insert the index finger of your other hand into the hole, stretching and rotating it to make a hole about 2.5 inches in diameter. (The bagel will resemble a ring at this point but when boiled, it will puff up and the hole will close in to bagel size, about 1 inch.)

I kind of modified that. I made them into balls and pinched the bottom so that the balls had a tight surface, then I pushed a hole through the middle, and then I flipped them around my finger to stretch them out. Place the shaped bagel rings onto lightly floured parchment paper (or anything really, just make sure it’s floured so the dough doesn’t stick).

Do this for all 10 chunks so you have 10 pre-bagel rings:

Let those rise for 15 minutes.

Boil the bagels

While the bagel rings rise, fill a large pot with water and add 2 tablespoons of molasses (or 0.25 cup of sugar) and 1 teaspoon of baking soda. Boil it.

Once the molasses soda water is boiling, place the bagels in the water in batches of 2–3 at a time. Boil for 30 seconds to 2 minutes on each side, flipping them with a slotted spoon or skimmer (the longer you boil them, the thicker the crust).

Place the boiled bagels onto parchment paper to drain and dry a little. They’ll look wrinkled and sad, but they’ll look a lot smoother after baking.

Glaze

Whisk two egg whites with a teaspoon of water and brush the egg white mixture on each bagel, covering it as completely as possible. I like to do this while they’re sitting on the wet parchment paper that they’ve been draining on, so any excess egg wash drips onto it. Then transfer the glazed bagels to a clean parchment paper for cooking.

Bake

If you have a pizza stone, slide the parchment paper directly onto it. If you don’t, put the parchment paper onto a baking/cookie sheet and put that in the oven.

The baking process is a little wonky, but it makes them bake really well:

Bake at 500° for 5 minutes
Lower the temperature to 450° and bake for 20 minutes
Turn off the oven without opening it and keep the bagels in for 5 minutes
Open the oven door and leave the bagels in for 5 minutes
Finally take them out and cool them on a wire rack

Eat

Success! You’ve made your own delicious malted roundbois!

malty roundbois

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