Claire Saffitz Teaches You How to Make Perfect Bagels | Dessert Person

Claire Saffitz Teaches You How to Make Perfect Bagels | Dessert Person
In this episode of Dessert Person, Claire Saffitz takes you through the full tutorial of making homemade wood-fired everything bagels, from mixing a rye and bread flour dough, to boiling in malt syrup, and finishing with a generous crust of everything seasoning. Baked until golden in a wood-fired oven, these bagels are deeply flavorful, chewy, and crisp. Whether you’re a first-time bagel maker or a sourdough veteran, this tutorial has everything you need. Watch as Claire kneads, shapes, boils, and bakes with her signature precision and charm.

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Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:41 Bagels
01:09 Ingredients & Special Equipment
03:17 Make the Dough
08:48 Portion & Pre-Shape
10:36 Shape the Bagels
13:49 Prepare for Boiling
15:15 Prepare the Oven
17:21 Boil the Bagels
19:18 Bake the Bagels
22:41 Prepare the Toppings & Eat
24:29 Chicken Cam

Wood Fired Everything Bagels
Makes 12

5 cups bread flour (650g), plus more for kneading
1 cup rye flour (130g)
16g Diamond Crystal kosher salt
1 teaspoon active dry yeast (3g)
2 cups (480g) lukewarm or room temperature water
Several tablespoons barley malt syrup, for boiling
Everything bagel seasoning

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Video Series:
Producer/Director: Vincent Cross
Camera Operator: Calvin Robertson
Editor/Motion Graphics: Hal McFall

Animation Credits:
Character Designer/Animator/Backgrounds: Jack Sherry
Character Rigger: Johara Dutton

Oh, geez. Oh great, that’s going to go in. That’ll be the cold opener. Hi everyone. I’m Claire Saffitz.
Welcome to my home kitchen. We’re making bagels. It’s a really, really fun, cool process. It doesn’t use too many ingredients. Fun fact bagels are
boiled before they’re baked. And what’s going to be really cool about
this recipe is I’m going to cook them outside in the woodburning oven. So I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. My dad would go every Sunday and like ride
his bike and like bring us back bagels. That kind of formed for me my idea of a good bagel
with just something small, crusty, chewy, and it shouldn’t be like a puffy,
all like dough mass. To me bagels now are just, like, too
big and like, it’s not really a bagel. So this is I’m going to show you
how to achieve that. I’m going to do everything bagels That’s my preferred bagel because it’s
like, why choose? Just have an everything! This is kind of a modified version
of the bagel recipe in Dessert Person,
which is an everything bagel but I mix the seeds in. So I’m going to show you kind of a more
classic everything bagel recipe. I’m starting with bread flour. I am adding rye flour that is not really
typical in a bagel recipe, but I love it because it adds like
some of a little bit of that, like pumpernickel flavor,
which I really, really like. And it’s a whole grain flour. Then I have yeast, kosher salt, water. This is all that goes into the dough. It’s a very, very
straightforward bread recipe. I’m going to do everything.
So I have some everything spice mix here. But of course you could do
whatever you want. You could do plain, you could do poppy, sesame,
salt, garlic. It’s up to you. Some cornmeal just for
dusting the sheet tray. And then barley malt syrup,
which is an important ingredient. We make a solution with this and
boil the bagels in it first. This is a type of sugar. It helps to develop this beautiful,
like, crusty exterior to the bagels. What I don’t have here is the fixings
from, like, when we’re going to eat the bagels, which I haven’t purchased yet
but will have for tomorrow. You know, your cream cheese, your lox,
your onion, your capers. I have out my stand mixer. You don’t really need this
for putting together the dough. I just already had it out and it’s easy. Bagel dough is a low
hydration dough, meaning it has a lower proportion of water
than a lot of other styles of bread. And that means the dough is stiff
and, like, very easy to handle. So it’s very makeable by hand. I’m just going to let the mixer do
the work for me today. So I have the dough hook. Now, I don’t have a lot of the other
special equipment out because there’s like
kind of a lot of stuff. So I’m just going to
like name it and cause most of this is going to happen tomorrow. So we need a couple of sheet trays
for forming the bagels. I’m going to use a scale
for portioning everything out. I going to use a large stockpot
or a Dutch oven for boiling you need kind of like a
wide, large pot, a spider, a plate for putting on the seeds,
and then of course, the wood burning oven. An appeal. I don’t know, I haven’t done as much bread
baking in the oven. We’ve mostly been doing pizza,
which is more like live fire. For bagels it’s going
to be really different. I, I’m not sure what’s
going to happen. We’ll see. All right, so the first step is going
to be putting together the dough. So it’s the afternoon of the day before
I’m going to bake. So we put together the dough
the day before. That just makes it easier on the day of
for like, getting all your bagels together. I’m going to start with my bread flour
in my stand mixer bowl. If you’re doing this by hand,
just use a large mixing bowl. Then I’m going to add the rye flour. It’s five cups of bread
and one cup of rye. If you don’t want to use rye flour,
just replace it with more bread flour. Then we’re going to mix in the salt. Salt is usually 2% by weight to flour. Then this is instant yeast, a teaspoon. A lot of bagel recipes begin
with what’s called a preferment, which is a portion of the flour and water
mixed with a little bit of yeast, and that is left to sit out at room
temp for… or like can be put
in the fridge overnight, that’s left to sit before it’s mixed
with like the rest of the ingredients for the dough. And the idea is that this helps to develop
flavor by like separating a portion and letting it sit ahead of time. But because
we’re making it the night before I’m just mixing everything together. The whole dough is going to sit overnight
and that’s going to help develop flavor. So now I’m going to put
this into my mixer and I’m going to make
a little well in the center. I have 480g almost
exactly two cups of lukewarm water, very like just a couple temperatures
above room temp. And so you there’s something called
ideal dough temperature, which is basically the temperature that you want your dough
to be to sort of encourage fermentation. And so for bagels it’s like I think
it’s like, you know, between 70 and 75. So if you’re working in a cold kitchen,
you want to use water that’s a little bit warmer.
If you’re working in a hot kitchen, you can use water
that’s a little bit cooler. It’s about 70 degrees in here. So I have water that’s
just a little bit above that. And also the friction of the mixing
will increase the temperature as well. So I’m going to add the water. Lost a little bit. Now I’m going to turn this on. If doing this by hand
I would basically incorporate the water with like a wooden spoon. And then once all the water is absorbed
switch to just kneading it by hand. But I’m going to let the mixer do it
with the hook. It’s a very stiff dough. It’s
very easy to handle. You can definitely knead it by hand. It actually just takes a little bit
of like muscle strength to do it. I’m on the lowest speed, by the way,
for a really stiff dough like this. I don’t want to stress out the mixer,
so I’m going to leave it on the lowest setting and I’m going to mix
until this comes together and it’s going to be smooth and supple, at least 5 to 10 minutes. So after several
minutes in the mixer you can see we have
this very stiff dough. So I’m going to continue this by hand. I don’t really need to add any flour.
It was a little tacky coming out of the mixer, but even just after like 30s of kneading,
it firms up quite a bit. So we want this to be pretty well
developed. And development is really a term
that refers to gluten production, gluten development. So it means we want like a very, very firm
dough that has a lot of elasticity, which is which is an indication
that there’s a good amount of gluten. So we use bread flour, which is a higher
protein flour that produces more gluten. So it’s the proteins and wheat that
when they come into contact with water produce gluten,
which are these like stretchy strands that give bread
its chew and bagels… The predominant texture of bagel
should be chewy. And I’m going to continue to knead by hand
until the dough gives me a lot of resistance. It’s kind of a rocking motion with your body
so that you can use your momentum. And I’m taking the heel of of one hand and kind of pushing with the other hand
to give it some extra strength. As I kind of rock forward, I push down and away onto the dough
and then as I walk, as I like, move back, I kind of bring the dough up
and give it a rotation. So I have my feet spaced apart,
one in front and one behind. So let’s take a look at the dough. It’s nice and smooth, so it’s super firm when I poke it
see how it springs back like that. That’s a sign of a moderately developed
dough basically. So I’m going to do this with flour.
Put it back in the bowl, cover it. This is going to sit out at room temp
until it is somewhere between 50% expanded in size and doubled. So not quite doubled
because it’s going to go into the fridge. And that rise is going to continue but very slowly because it will be cold.
It’s going to get a little extra bench flour. One great thing about bagels is
they are very freezable. So yes, this recipe makes a dozen. Maybe your family’s not eating
a dozen bagels in one sitting, but freeze the rest. A baker once gave me this tip,
which I think is a really good tip, which is to take a photo with your phone of the size of the dough
before that bulk fermentation or that first rise, and then
that’s your comparison point, because like, your memory
doesn’t always it’s not always going to, you know, it’s not going
to remember… accurately. Depends on the
temperature of your kitchen. But I would say anywhere
from one two hours for that rise. And then it’ll go into the fridge. Then tomorrow on day
two is the shaping of the bagels, the boiling and the baking. So it’s the next morning. I’m very excited.
So I’m going to pull out the dough. Cal and Vince started the fire. So the oven is heating up
because that takes a little while. But we do need to let the bagels proof. So the next step is I’m going to grab
the dough. We’re going to shape them and let them
proof at room temperature for a while. In the time it spent in the fridge,
it has continued to rise and doubled in size.
So this looks really good. So I’m going to
get the dough out onto the work surface. I don’t really need flour
because the dough is so stiff it doesn’t really stick. This recipe makes a dozen bagels. They’re each about four ounces, four
ounces is kind of like a standard bagel size. So I’m going to start portioning
and weighing. Is that a cat? Am I not going to get a dozen? Two, four, six, seven,
I really got like eleven. I guess I didn’t scale up enough.
Six, eight, ten, eleven. All right. Is it the new baker’s dozen? Is eleven the new baker’s dozen? All right, I got eleven.
I got eleven bagels. Now I’m going to pre-shape. We’re just going to make
little balls of dough here before we form the final bagel shape. So basically like pinch together
like a bowl of garlic and a kind of smooth dome. And then I put that on the surface
pinch side down. Just kind of roll it around the surface,
cup my hand around it, roll it around. And then you get this kind of nice
smooth shape. So I’m just going to repeat that process
with all the remaining pieces. And then because we’ve done a fair
amount of manipulating of the dough, you know, we’ve worked that gluten, it’s
going to need a little bit of a rest, maybe like a 15 minute bench rest
so that the gluten can relax a little bit. And then we’re able to form
the bagel shape and the dough is not going to fight us by
springing back. I’m going to cover them. And after a 15 minute bench rest,
I’ll come back and I’ll show you how to make that final bagel shape. So these are ready for shaping the gluten has relaxed a little bit, so we will be able to kind of stretch
the dough into the shape, ring that we want. There are a couple of different techniques
for shaping bagels. The easiest I think is
basically to form balls like I did, and then to
poke a hole literally like poke a hole in it with your finger
and then work it into a ring. Now, the thing with bagels
is they do puff up during cooking, and so you want to make the hole larger than you think
it needs to be in a lot of ways. So I go until it’s
sort of like a four inch circle. So you want the diameter of the hole
to be at least a couple inches, because it will kind of fill back in
as the bagel puffs about four inches in diameter.
So that looks pretty good. So actually I have to…
One thing I didn’t do that I should have done is
I didn’t prep the sheet tray. So let me do that right now. I’m going to put a little bit
of oil down on the parchment. And then a little bit of course cornmeal. And that’s just going to really protect
everything from sticking. I can get this down on our baking sheet. And the diameter of the hole itself
is about two inches. That is that method. Now I saw the…
a baker do it this way. And it’s actually kind of a cool technique. If you have…
This is a dough whisk. This is kind of the perfect tool for this. If you had like a I don’t know like a wooden spoon
that would have this shape. But basically I have this kind of dowel
that has a taper here. If you poke it into the center. And again, this is not my technique. This is something I saw a baker do. I think it was Richard Bertinet,
a famous baker. And you like roll it onto the ring. It makes it easy I think. So that’s the ring method. And then once I place it on the parchment, I do actually like to flatten it
a little bit. I think it helps to give it
more of that bagel shape. So now the other method is
this is the like snake method. So basically what you want to do
is form your portion of dough into a log. So if you’re going to use this method I would pre-shape
into this kind of more torpedo look. You’re going to roll it out. With slightly tapered ends. Then you wrap it around your palm
overlapping the ends. Sometimes I even like to tuck one
and under like that. And then you roll across the surface
to seal the ends together. If it is springing back on you, then
it needs a little bit longer on the rest. Another thing you can do
is after you’ve formed them, if you want to go back
and stretch the bagels out a little bit, you can, once
they’ve had a chance to rest. And these are like
a little under four inches. So I’ll go back in
and kind of widen them out a little bit. They’re going to get covered in oiled
plastic wrap just to keep the moisture in. So these are now going to proof at room temperature
which is basically like their second rise. It’s not a particularly long proof
because the point of bagels is that they are by definition
like dense and chewy. So I’m going to let these sit at room
temperature. In the meantime,
I’m going to continue to tend the fire to bring the oven up to temp.
It needs to be 500 degrees. So if you’re baking at home,
preheat your oven to 500. If it goes that high, if not 475. I’m kind of setting up my station for boiling,
which happens before baking. So I have my everything spice mix. I’m going to get that onto just a plate
so that it’s in a single layer. I’m going to add my barley
malt syrup to my water. So I’m just going to grab a spoon. This stuff is really,
really thick and sticky. It has kind of a crazy texture. You know what I’m going to use… This slotted spoon for boiling. And I’m going to stir this into the water
and I didn’t, I’m not calling for a specified amount because it depends
on how much water you have. But basically you want to
add this, stir to dissolve, and you want to add enough so that
the color looks like strong black tea. So that’s usually several tablespoons. If you don’t have barley malt syrup it’s something you can find in
health food stores. If you can’t find it you can use molasses. So this color looks good. That was probably like
three tablespoons or so. This mixture is coming up to a boil. So I want to show you a test for
determining if your bagels are proofed. It’s called the float test. See how it floats. So that means I’m proofed. I’m ready to proceed
to boiling and baking. Now the problem is that
my oven isn’t really ready yet. And in the meantime, I’m
going to throw my bagels into the fridge, and that’s going to slow down the proof process so they don’t over proof
while I wait for the oven. The oven has been firing
for two hours at least. Almost two and a half. This is my firing door. Oops. I’ll put this down here. So we’re down to coals. I mean, it’s super hot. It’s so hot that the
thermometer won’t read it. So now we’re going to
rake out the coals. I’ll put them in my bucket carefully, and I’ll sweep the floor to clean it off so it’s ready for bagels. We don’t want to
just put the bagels in now, because the floor is so hot from the coals
that it would just burn. Then we do a step called soaking. We basically seal the…
seal the oven. We cut off the oven from the chimney so
it doesn’t lose heat out of the chimney, and we let it just sit so
that the heat can sort of evenly disperse throughout the oven, throughout the
the floor, the walls, the dome. And that creates our oven for baking. Technically, is this
considered wood-fired bagels not really, because there isn’t really
going to be any active coals in the oven while the bagels are baking. All right. These were really easy coals to rake out,
and there’s not even very much ash in there, which is great. I probably should have put this bucket somewhere
other than just directly in front of the… How hot is the… is this? All right. So there’s just a couple of coals
left in there. I’m just going to leave it, and I’m going to use my brush
to kind of sweep away some of that ash. Sorry Vince. All right, this looks great. Now we have a clean baking surface
and I’m going to put on the baking door. The baking door fits inside the door to cut off the chimney kind of wedges in there. This looks great. And now we soak for 20 minutes. So the timing is really good. We’re going to go and boil the bagels in
the 20 minutes that this is going to soak and then we’ll come back out and bake. It’s really hot. But without the coals in there I think
that the temperature will, you know, drop. This is almost at a boil. I’m going to grab one of my sheet
trays of bagels. The boiling process is pretty quick. It’s about 30 to 45 seconds on each side. And the point of boiling
is that not only does it kind of coat the outer layer of bagel
in this kind of like sugary solution, which helps to make it nice and brown,
but it also sets the dough and that outer layer, and it makes it
so that the bagels don’t really expand beyond the crust that forms during boiling
when they bake. So you notice, like,
you don’t ever see like a slash in bagels with like an opening
the way you that that you see in bread and you want to boil as many as you can
kind of comfortably fit inside the pot with a little bit of room
for them to bob around. That float test is important. Not because, not just because,
we want them to proof, but because we want them
to float in the solution. So I’m going to watch my clock. I have a clock here in
my kitchen that has second hand. So I’m going to watch it.
I’m going to do about 45 seconds per side. Now when they come out. This is where the coating happens. If you’re going to do
any kind of coated bagel like I’m doing everything here, you could do,
like I said, poppy, sesame, garlic, salt, any of those, the coating happens
when they come out of the water. I’m almost at 45 seconds. Now I’m going to flip them over.
So another 45 or so. So I have a little like damp paper
towel here because I like to actually just let a little excess drip
of the solution drip onto here before you basically just like
set it down. You can sprinkle
or you can just kind of set it down. So I’m going to start
taking them out and coating. So if you make these
at home you will notice a dramatic change in the texture
like they have, they’re now firm. So it’s just a quick
kind of dip in the seeds and then back on the sheet tray. Okay I’m going to set this tray behind me
and grab the second tray. We’re going to boil those the exact
same way we did the first. So I have all eleven bagels. It went up. Now it’s
in the six hundreds, low sixes. Dang. I’m just gonna have to sit here. CAL: But the top of the dome
is always going to be hotter, right? I don’t know, I guess so. Heat rises. Actually, hot air rises. Got a chair or something I’m gonna go sit over here. Although 1 million chickens
have pooped on this step, but… Oh, geez. Oh great, that’s going to go in. Just be here while this oven comes down to temp. Cal, what are you talking about?
It’s at 585. I was just getting 530 and 560. Yeah, that’s at the front of the oven,
but in the back we’re talking high fives. VINNY: High fives are good. 550 in the back. Okay fine. All right. We’re just going to bake these. So I’m going to load these in. I heard a little sizzle
when they went down. All right let me get the second batch. So I’m definitely going
to have to do some rotating because some of the bagels are closer
to the front where it’s much cooler and some are in the back. So I’m going to set
my timer for eight minutes and then I’m going to rotate. I think they’re going to bake really fast
because it’s really hot in there. My concern is that maybe
the outside is going to get really dark before the inside bakes, but they’re not that big,
so we’ll hope for the best. And I’m going to rotate in
seven and a half minutes. Also note putting them in is going to drop the temp
because they’re cold. How much I’m not sure. This oven really
was a project. Oops. So many different stages of it too. I really wish they got in closer
with this pile of gravel. Do you know what it’s called
when you put the mortar on the side of the brick, you butter it. Wow. My God. I should bake in this
oven more often. It’s a lot of work, but good thing we have enough wood. I’m going to get like
a shot of the… The wood piles. VINNY: You got that
critter right up there. Oh, he’s so cute I love them. It smells really good. I can smell the bagel smell. And it smells like a bagel bakery. Not surprisingly. Let me take a quick peek. Oh, my God, they look so good.
Holy… Oh my God, they look so good. I’m going to try to do some rotating. They’re not burning. I’m actually really glad
that we put them in hot. Okay so that’s my timer. I’m going to set it for another
eight and we’ll check. Let’s take a look. They’ve been in
for just about 15 minutes total. Oh they’re done. And they look amazing. They’re like deep… Oh my gosh you guys. How… okay I would say
maybe the spices burned a little bit but… Maybe a lot. Maybe they burned a lot. But that’s okay. The bagels themselves are
really nicely done. Those are going to be delicious. All right timer off. I want to see
what the final temp is in here just to see where did we land. 480s. I seriously could not be happier. I kind of can’t believe it worked. I’ve not done a ton of bread baking in this oven yet,
and there is a learning curve. But yeah, the spices burned,
but everything looks great. I’m going to let this cool off.
We’re going to bring the bagels inside. You want to eat a fresh bagel. A bagel that is fresh
does not need toasting. So let’s go inside. We’re gonna dig into these. So it’s early afternoon. Perfect time for brunch. We’re going to do,
like, a whole bagel spread. That’s what we’re going to
have for lunch today. But while they’re still warm,
I want to just cut and taste one and just, like, do a little plain cream cheese so
I can really kind of appreciate the bagel for what it is. Has such a nice crust. I can feel it kind of like cracking
as the knife goes through. Pro move is to take all this, save all the seeds that come off of the bagel
and stick them on top of the cream cheese. The crumb looks excellent. No big air pockets, it’s a tight crumb. It’s still light to the touch
for its size, like it’s airy but tight crumb. It smells so good. You can see how it’s beige. That’s that rye flour that we added so that’s just going to give that
extra flavor. This is a really,
really nicely baked bagel that burnished golden brown
look that’s from the barley malt syrup. All right. So I’m just going to give it
a little cream cheese. This is what you do. So chewy. I love the size.
Thin but very crisp crust. MMM I love the addition of rye. It really does give you like
a hint of pumpernickel. So it’s a really fun project. You can make the dough the day
before, they freeze well, you can revive them by toasting. And like bagels are best eaten fresh
so it doesn’t get more fresh than baking them yourself at home. I love this recipe. It’s so good. I love making bagels. Should just do it more often. I think more is more
when it comes to bagels. I like a lot of cream cheese,
smoked salmon, I like sliced onion. I like tomato, throw
some capers on there. That’s great. That’s my bagel. So thank you so much for watching