Homemade Bagel Recipes and Other Boiled Bread Recipes
Boiled breads, like bagels, pretzels and dumplings, turn out soft and chewy. Enjoy a few homemade bagel recipes and other boiled bread recipes.
Karen Keb
2010 Guide to Homemade Bread
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Use this article to make a multitude of delicious homemade breads.
Karen Keb
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I read somewhere that “an unboiled bagel is just a roll with a hole,” and it caused me to think about the intricacies of various foods, how they’re made and what makes them unique. Good boiled breads, such as bagels and pretzels, are soft and chewy, and they take a while to get through. Fresh from the oven, homemade bagel recipes and other boiled bread recipes are shiny and deliciously yeasty.
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FIVE HOMEMADE BAGEL RECIPES AND OTHER BOILED BREAD RECIPES:
Plain Bagels Recipe
Jalapeño Bagel Recipe
Pumpkin Spice Bagels
Herbed Cornmeal Dumplings
Soft Pretzels
It’s amazing how different something can taste when it hasn’t been corrupted by preservatives, trucked 1,500 miles to a grocery store and aged on the shelf for several days. Mass-produced bagels are vastly different from homemade. Most brands sold today are extruded; that means the dough is forced through tubes, mechanically cut to size, then steamed (rather than boiled). This high-speed process turns out thousands of “units” per hour, but it stresses the dough. Hand-forming a bagel, followed by boiling, gives much better results.
Why boil? Let’s look at bagels ‒ boiling is responsible for this holey bread’s unique qualities. Specifically, boiling serves three purposes: First, it sets the shape and kills off some of the yeast on the outer surface of the dough, limiting the bagel’s expansion when it’s baked. Second, it gelatinizes the starches on the surface, leading to a shiny coating and a chewy texture. Finally, it activates the yeast in the inner layers of dough.