I’ve made bagels 7 or 8 times at this point, and thought I’d settled on a recipe I liked… but cooking in a new kitchen always throws a few wrenches in the works. In this case, the oven in a vacation home rented with friends didn’t seem to want to go above 350F, while I wanted 450F… so I baked some bagels in the oven, but cooked most of them on a gas BBQ grill on the outside deck. To my surprise, that worked pretty well.
Here are a few quick & blurry photos– I’ll post my favorite recipe and variants I’ve tried some day in the future.
Making the dough (just high-gluten flour, salt, barley malt syrup, yeast, and water) the night before, and a precariously-located laptop I’d written down the recipe in:
(p.s. don’t judge me for the Bud Light Lime in the background… we also had a 16-beer set of the Mikkeller Single Hop Series, three beers brewed with coffee, and eight different kinds of canned craft beer):
The kneaded, rolled, and formed bagels:
After rising in the fridge (important!) for about 14 hours:
Boiling for just 30 seconds in water (with a little barley malt syrup in it):
On foil on the top rack of a grill (cooked for about 20 minutes with the grill closed, fiddling with the gas as the temperature according to the low-resolution grill dial thermometer ranged between 400 and 600F):
Checking the crumb and texture of a bagel – moderately chewy success! Though a bit undercooked or cooked too far from the heat– no golden-brown crust.
Eating with all the fixings (cream cheese, lox, local smoked trout and salmon, tomato, red onion, and capers… with hummus as another option since it was lunchtime):
