(Disclaimer: This recipe is from the lovely Margaret Anne from Natural Chow, but I’m just posting how I made it using her recipe.)

I was procrastinating bored yesterday and I really wanted to make something easy. When I need inspiration, I always head over to Pinterest and there were like five pictures of bagels that popped up instantly, so if that wasn’t a sign, I don’t know what would be.

My first attempt at these weren’t so bad, if I say so myself. Sure, they aren’t perfectly round and the hole might be a bit too big, but it tastes way better than a store-bought bagel (no preservatives and all those other bad things!).

So when I was looking at the other bagel recipes floating around the internet, all of them had to boil the bagels before baking them. I thought that was very weird, like putting dough in water before baking it? Who came up with that?

Naturally, I had to search it up. I found out that by boiling them, the starch on the outside of the bagels forms a gel with the water, resulting in a crusty exterior after baking (and prevents the water from totally soaking the dough). Also, the longer you boil them for, the more denser and chewier the bagel because it prevents the dough from rising to much. Good to know, eh?

Another perk is this recipe makes 8 bagels for a much cheaper price tag than the 6 bagels you can buy at the store.

To make the bagel holes, it was actually pretty fun! I poked a hole in the middle of the dough and twirled the entire thing on my index finger, creating a 2-inch hole, which shrunk when I was boiling the bagels.