This Changed Everything I Knew About Bagels

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Written and Filmed by: Charlie Anderson
Edited by: Van Clements and Charlie Anderson

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So when you think about where to get a great Bagel you probably automatically think of New York and they do have great Bagels as I figured out in my last video but are they actually the best because recently I’ve come across another style that’s completely changed my idea of

What a bagel even could be they’re a lot different than what most of us are accustomed to and today I’m going to put them to the test the Montreal style Bagel Montreal style Bagel the perfect Montreal bagel it’s poached in Honey then baked in a Woodfired oven to give

It its distinctively sweet taste and chewy texture now un for I haven’t been to Montreal myself so I haven’t been able to try the real thing but I was able to find a few pretty good videos online of Montreal’s two most iconic bagel shops Fairmount and St VOR and I

Also found a pretty good looking recipe from a guy who seems to have a fair bit of expertise on the subject now this recipe comes from a bunch of research that I’ve done over the last couple of years and from asking endless questions while standing in line at the bakery to

The point where I’m sure the Bakers are tired of me asking those questions and from watching on all these videos I picked up on a few things that are pretty surprising based on what I currently know about making Bagels give me one sec now we’re cooking so we know

New York Bagels they use a high gluten flour in their dough and they also use a relatively low hydration around 55 to 60% and that’s what’s going to give us the denser structure that we’re looking for in a good bagel the only sort of unusual ingredient is the addition of

Some barley malt syrup which is going to give the bagels just a bit of sweetness along with a distinct sort of multi flavor Montreal Bagels though have a few key differences they’re still pretty chewy and dense like all Bagels should be so I do think they’re using High

Gluten flour I also still think they’re using around the same 55 to 60% hydration but what they don’t do is include the barley malt syrup instead they add a little bit of sugar and they enrich the dough with a bit of eggs and oil which is very interesting because

I’ve never seen that before in a bagel recipe with a New York Bagel they’re very rustic and chewy largely because they’re not enriched so I’m very curious to see what effect that has on the dough but that’s really only where the differences begin because New York Bagels are usually mixed then allowed to

Rise then shaped and then allowed to rise again overnight whereas Montreal bagels are mixed using those weird sort of old school mixers which I’d never seen before but once they’re removed they’re immediately shaped and then boiled and baked so they really aren’t given that much time to rise I’m not

Sure how long they stay in that mixer for but that’s pretty much the entire First Rise and then they get no second rise at all so again very interesting and I’m guessing it’s going to lead to a little bit of a smaller and denser Bagel when compared to the new New York style

But now let’s talk boiling and baking because as we know from my last video New York style bagels are boiled in a roaring hot kettle of water that’s been spiked with a little bit of barley malt syrup and they’re boiled for just about 30 seconds to a minute but in Montreal

They actually add honey to the water instead of barley malt syrup and based on the videos I’ve seen they seem to boil at a much lower temperature I don’t even know if you could call it boiling it looks like more of a simmer and because of that the bagels stay in the

Kettle for longer about 2 to 3 minutes then from there they’re actually transferred to a wood fired oven where they’re baked for about 10 to 15 minutes as opposed to the 15 to 20 minutes in a more traditional Bakery oven that they use in New York and as expected it looks

Like the two methods lead to pretty different results but I won’t know for sure until I give them a try for myself but we can’t have Bagels without coffee and that’s where today’s sponsor Aero press comes in because if you’re like me morning coffee is non-negotiable but I’m

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Coffee Aeropress ships to the US and over 60 countries across the world so thanks again to Aeropress for sponsoring this video and thank you for your support now let’s make some bagels so I got started on the New York Bagels first since it’s a 2-day process and the

Recipe I’m making is based on Claire sait’s recipe from New York Times cooking but I’ve made a few small changes to it the main one being that I’m using High gluten flour where she used use bread flour because I think that extra chew you get from the high

Gluten flour is sort of what defines a New York Bagel then from there I’m using 2% salt .5% yeast 60% water and 3% barley malt syrup which I just bought on Amazon but according to some comments on my last video you may be able to find it

At your local health food store or home brewing store although personally I haven’t had a chance to check yet but once everything is mixed together I like to let the dough rest for about 30 minutes to make it easier to knad because we are going to have to knead

For about a full 10 minutes and you can use a stand mixer if you prefer but this is a strong stiff dough so I’d recommend only making it in small batches to avoid putting too much strain on the motor I’d also recommend picking up a metal spiral

Hook if you don’t already have one I just got this one on Amazon so I’ll link it below but it mixes a lot more efficiently than the plastic hook that came with the mixer anyways Once the dough is nice and smooth we’ll just let it rise until it’s grown by maybe 25 to

50% at which point we can go ahead and roll the bagels into the ring shape because despite what some people try to say good New York Bagels are hand rolled so I’ll just cut off a thin strip making sure it weighs about 3 and 1/2 oz then

Wrap it around my hand and roll it on the counter like so to close off the bagel and from there I’ll toss them onto a baking tray which I’ve lightly dusted with cornmeal then cover them all up with a damp towel and throw them into the fridge for the overnight

Fermentation and the next morning before I can get ready to boil and bake these I need to prepare my Montreal bagel dough and for this one I’m pretty much just using the recipe I got from that Glenn and friend’s cooking video but again I did make a few changes because he didn’t

Specify using High gluten flour but again that’s what I’m using here and I’m also using two % salt which is something that he didn’t include at all then I also upped the yeast amount slightly to 5% and from there I’m using his recommended 7% egg 1.2% oil 4% sugar and

0.9% maltt powder then when it comes to hydration his recipe only came out to about 53% which seems low to me based on how the dough looked in the videos so I think 60% seems a little bit more reasonable and that’s what I’m using for

My recipe and Once the dough is mixed I again let it rest for 30 minutes before kneading for 10 minutes and then letting it rise for just about about 30 more minutes it’s probably not quite doubled in size which seems about right it didn’t look to be too Airy when they

Were taking it out of the machines and dividing it up just going to take it out here now as we know these aren’t going to have a second Rise here so basically once we divide them and roll them into their Bagel shape they’re going to go

Straight into the water to boil and so for reference these are my New York Bagels that have been proofing in the fridge overnight you can see they’ve blown up just a bit which is to be expected for a New York style bagel and that’s different than what we’re going

To see with these Mont all style Bagels because when they go to shape these what they do is roll it out the same way as a New York Bagel but when they go to wrap it around their hand they leave a little bit of a bigger hole in the middle and

So you end up with a thinner bagel with a bigger hole all right and now that we got these Bagels rolled out let’s go ahead and boil them and like I said this is where the next big difference comes in because in New York it’s traditional

To spike the kettle water with some of this same barley malt syrup like what we used in the dough the sugar in here is going to help the exterior of the bagel to kind of of brown caramelized and give you that shiny crispy crust that you’d

Expect in a good New York bagel and the Montreal style Bagel uses a similar technique but instead of malt syrup they just use honey so I’m curious to see what the difference is actually going to be I’m assuming there’s going to be a little bit of a flavor difference

Between the two when it comes to the amount I couldn’t really find a solid answer on that so I’m just going to kind of go visually based on what I saw in New York and in some videos that I’ve watched at New York bagel shops so here

I added about 2 tbspoon to my 10 cups of water and actually that seems to just about right so I’ll do about the same ratio with my Montreal water and we’re good to go so first I brought my New York water to a pretty hard boil then

Threw the bagels in for about a minute flipping them halfway through before tossing them with some everything bagel seasoning and onto a baking triay with the Montreal water I brought it to more of a simmer maybe around 200° F and boiled the bagels for 3 minutes flipping halfway through before tossing them with

The most traditional topping in Montreal which are plain sesame seeds and throwing the bagels onto a baking tray now unfortunately I don’t have a woodf fired oven to work with at home so I’m doing my best job to simulate the two different baking methods here so I set

My oven to 450° F or 230° C and for the New York Bagels I threw them onto my highest oven rack whereas with the Montreal Bagels I threw them onto my second lowest rack the idea being that since the heat in my oven comes from the bottom the Montreal Bagels should get

That intense heat from the bottom element to sort of emulate that wood fired effect whereas the New York Bagels will bake at a slightly lower more consistent temperature and just as expected when I went to flip the bagels halfway through the montre Bagels had some nice charring on the bottoms just

Like what I saw in the videos while the New York Bagels had a more uniform brown color and sure enough the Montreal Bagels baked in about 15 minutes where the New York Bagels took about 20 all right so these Montreal Bagels look pretty good I already tore One open for

Some b-roll footage you can see they’ve got that sort of non-uniform charring like what you get from a woodf fired oven so that lower oven rack technique seemed to work pretty well probably could have made them a little bit smaller but otherwise they seem to be pretty close I’m actually surprised by

How much they Rose in the oven even without that second proof the New York Bagels on the other hand though not super happy with how they turned out they actually didn’t really rise much at all in the oven I’m thinking what happened is that I probably just

Overproofed them they do seem to have a nice shiny crisp exterior but I really don’t think it would be fair to compare these two in the state so what I’m going to do here is make another batch and come back with those Tomorrow all right here we we go so these ones are looking a little bit better I still would have liked to get a little more rise out of these New York Bagels for whatever reason they didn’t rise a ton in the oven I don’t know if

It was the boiling because we boil them at such a high temperature maybe it’s the barley malt syrup it’s just something I’ll have to figure out as I go and perfect this recipe because like I said the bagels that I tried in New York seem to kind of blow up to where

You couldn’t see through this Center hole even if you wanted to Montreal Bagels though actually look pretty good despite not being able to use a wood fired oven that bottom oven rack trick seemed to work pretty well well the one thing I’ll say is that I had a little

Bit of trouble closing them off as you can see just because they’re shaped right before boiling I think you really need to make sure that seams closed off when you roll them as you can see I made a couple different types of each for comparison purposes so let’s see what

We’re working with here start with the classics of each so I’ll go with the everything New York first pretty solid that’s pretty much what I would expect here has that little bit of crispness on the exterior a ton of chew the one thing I will say is you

Know as I could kind of tell from the visuals I would like it to be a little bit less dense than this it also does have a little sweetness to it a little more than I’d probably like so I think that reducing the amount of barley malt

Syrup that I use will probably help to fix that issue a little bit I might also want to try including a bagel improver like what they do at Utopia I think that should help to get a little bit better rise and softness to the bagels too definitely not bad though it’s the type

Of bagel that I’m used to but what I’m very curious to try is this Montreal bagel H very interesting it’s defin unlike any bagel I’ve had before it still got a really nice chew to it because that high gluten flour although not quite as chewy as a New York Bagel

It’s got a little bit of softness and kind of richness to it due to the eggs and the oil that we added me it’s kind of like a hybrid between the typical Bagel that we have here in the US and like an enriched sandwich roll it’s definitely not quite as enriched or

Buttery as like a Brio Bread but just a little bit more so than your typical Bagel let me try the everything though too just for a direct comparison I actually do really like this one though I don’t know if it’s just because it’s different than what I’m used to but

It’s kind of nice that it’s not as hard to chew through although I mean your classic New York or American Bagel still really good I mean that chewi is what you’d expect and if you’re in the mood for it it’s great it’s hard to say which of these really I like

Better kind of the main differences I’m seeing though overall are just the New York Bagel is going to be a little bit denser a little bit chewier and it’s going to have a little crisper exterior with that kind of blistering and bubble bubling that you typically see I’m

Assuming that’s due to the higher boiling temperature and maybe the different baking method as well but either way you can definitely see a difference in the texture of the crust between the two the Montreal bagel on the other hand still pretty chewy but it’s got a lot softer kind of more

Tender crumb to it again still dense like all Bagels should be and especially because this is just sort of my version of it it’s not really an authentic result quite yet but it definitely makes me want to go to Montreal to try the real thing so it’s definitely a recipe I

Think I’ll want to work on at some point but for now my main focus is still on the New York Bagel so if you want to see my last video where I went to New York and tried some of the best bagels in the city you can check that video out right

Here either way thanks a lot for watching and I’ll talk to you in the next one