B Is for Bagel

Yeah, I made them. And I'll do it again.

My natural skepticism and burning desire to prove everyone wrong led me to immediately question this simple bagel recipe I found recently. How could just a stirring together of flour, water, yeast and salt- no kneading, no lengthy rise time- make a decent bread?

Call it science, magic, the devil's touch- however you look at it, it really does work. And it makes something fit to have with the most expensive, precious tea you've got stashed away.

It honestly took less time to make homemade bagels than it did to upload these images. What are you waiting for?





You even get to boil them before baking, which is delightfully counterintuitive if you've ever made a yeasted bread before. Or maybe it just seems that way to me because I never lived anyplace that even served cream cheese, much less bagels, until I was in college.

(I was too busy marveling at this stage to document it, so you'll just have to imagine what it looked like.)

And it was hard to pause before devouring the final product:


My other morning discovery, which may sound a little strange coming from a vegetarian: If you have one of these with a cup of Hou Shan Yellow Buds, a Chinese yellow tea, you'll pick up some delicious roasty, bacon-y overtones that I'd never noticed in this tea before. Perhaps it was playing off the salty, seedy taste of the bagel; who knows? Ours is not to reason why.*


*Possibly my favorite thing about writing this entry was researching the origin of that saying, and finding a post asking if it came "from Shakespeare, or maybe Bugs Bunny?"