A few days ago, I read on the King Arthur Flour blog about making bagels. My first thought was, “Bagels! How great would it be to make homemade bagels!” My second thought was, “Julie! What is your problem? You don’t have time to make bagels! You just started a new class (Media Utilization in the Curriculum, thanks for asking), plus you live in the same town as Scratch Baking, home of some fairly amazing bagels. You don’t need to make bagels.” Never mind that I never seem to make it over to Scratch, and that when I do go, I always end up spending more than $20.

I do, however, have time to make homemade pizza. We probably do this about once a week, but the crust making is usually Dave’s realm. So this weekend, he was working in the attic, and I thought I’d make the crust myself. I saw King Arthur has one of their “guaranteed” recipes for pizza crust, which I made, and failed to read the recipe properly (even though they specifically tell you to read the whole thing before you make it) and so didn’t plan for a double rising (doesn’t pizza crust usually only rise once?). And so, at dinner time, the dough had not risen enough, and we just had frozen ravioli. Fine.

But then I got it into my head that I could use the failed pizza dough to make bagels. Sure, it wasn’t the “official” recipe, but why not try their method of steaming the bagels, and see what happened? How bad could it be? Let me say that I had some serious doubts about how bad it could really be (as in: really bad) at several points during this experiment, but the final result was, in fact, delicious!

Here are the bagels, all shaped, the night before. I covered them with plastic wrap and let them rise overnight in the fridge.

Here's how they looked the next morning, after rising.

Awaiting steaming. I don't have the right kind of lid for my skillet (it would squish the bagels), so I used another skillet, turned upside down. Here we're just waiting for the water to boil.

Steaming. You can see my odd upside-down skillet set-up, as well as my trusty timer counting down 2 minutes, since the recipe made it very clear that only a precisely-timed 2-minute steam would do. I was very worried about this whole process post-steaming, since the bagels seemed to acquire a leathery outer shell.

I was also a bit skeptical post-baking. They're a bit misshapen, no?

But then here they are after the seeds are baked on, and they were starting to look a bit more bagely.

And lo! When split open, there was all kinds of chewy goodness!

Notice that Henry and Eli, while clearly enjoying their hot! fresh! bagels! are also fairly blase about it. "Oh yeah, whatever, my mom made fresh bagels for breakfast this morning. Some kids get donuts, I hear."

"You want me to do what? Eat it, you say?"

"This thing here? You want me to eat this?"

"Well, alright. If you say so. But this doesn't seem quite right."

"Well what do you know? I love it!"

I have to say, the whole thing was so successful that I’m actually going to try making the real recipe sometime this week, to see if they puff up a bit more (mine were tasty, but oddly shaped). (Therefore, I have now decided to spend even more time on a baked good that we don’t especially need, when my time could probably be much better spent doing something else, like figuring out what our new bathroom will look like, or seeing if we can get a cheap contractor to put new windows up in our attic.)