I made homemade pretzels a bit back (this will be discussed soon) and had so much fun boiling dough. Bagels were clearly the next project.
I'm not sure why I hadn't tried making homemade bagels before. They are not difficult, don't take long to make (at least with the recipe I used) and are so delicious, they should be illegal. Really, just incredibly good. We love bagels in this house and the really good local ones we buy are .99 cents each. It adds up, man. So, we are making them at home from now on. I made them smaller, 12 from the recipe not 10. The girls love the small size, too. They freeze beautifully.
The recipe I used was from Martha's Baking Handbook
And I also checked Smitten Kitchen's archives for bagel recipes knowing she would have one, and she does, but dang, that's a lot of text! I just couldn't hang, nor could I wait a day to bake them, so I went for the easier version.
I wanted to make homemade cream cheese for these, but I didn't and really, they got eaten so fast—I didn't get a chance to wait for whey to drip from anything. You know how it goes. Can't speed up that whey drippage. There are many recipes out there for homemade cream cheese, some are simple, some take longer, some use rennet some don't, so I will report back. There is a recipe in this book for cream cheese, but this one looks much simpler. Too simple? Anyone making homemade cream cheese?
