- 1.5 cups room temperature water
- 4.5 tsp quick-rising yeast
- 1 tsp white sugar
- 2.5 tsp salt
- 1 whole egg
- 1 egg yolk (that's the yellow bit in the middle)
- 1/4 cup oil (we used olive)
- ½ cup honey for the dough
- 5 cups white flour
- 1/3 cup honey for the boiling bagel bath
- Some sort of topping for your bagel (sesame seeds, poppy seeds, flax seeds, whatever)
Because it is the best honey in the known universe we used Scandia honey - lots of it.
Mix together the water, yeast, salt and sugar. Then, blend in the egg and egg yolk, oil and ½ cup of honey. Add the five cups of flour until the dough is stiff and smooth (er...uhm,...). You can do this by hand.
We did it the easy way.
Place the dough ball in a lightly oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap for about twenty minutes.
While you're waiting, light your charcoal with your looft lighter...
...and set up your grill for indirect cooking with a high quality pizza stone (see above).
Pretend that the dough is the idiot you saw dump his car's ashtray in the parking lot today and punch it. I have NO idea what this is supposed to accomplish but it's fun.
Portion the dough into twelve or so equal balls. Make sure your work surface has lots of extra flour on hand as this is sticky stuff.
Put a pinch of flour in the middle of every dough ball and then, with your hands, turn the ball and make a hole in the middle. Voila: one ring to rule them all. Place your dough rings on a towel on a cookie sheet and let them 'proof' for about fifteen minutes.
Your barbecue should be at 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Get about three quarts of water and the remaining 1/3 cup of honey boiling in a pot that's deep enough to bathe your bagels.
Beer's all gone - time for a mojito! (Spare me the email about how I should be using white rum - any port in a storm and all that...)
Slide your bagels into the James Brown Celebrity Honey Hot Tub for about 1.5 minutes per side. Remove them using a slotted spoon and cover them with whatever topping you've chosen.
Place the bagels onto your pizza stone. We found that additional, ground-level supervision was required at this stage.
With your mother-in-law's help, remove bagels when they're nicely browned (after about 25 minutes) and let cool.
While the bagels are cooling you could...grill some chicken...
...whip up some guacamole...
...and make yourself a tasty sandwich. Easy.
And, since the barbecue is still warm, you could also bake some fruit crumble for dessert - if you wanted to because, as we all know, you can bake anything in your barbecue... This recipe makes a sweet (in the literal sense, not the 'street' sense), tasty bagel. Ours turned out a bit less 'bagelly' and more 'bready' than I would prefer but still delicious and I think we could tweak a few things to make them denser. For some reason, they were even tastier the day after we baked them. You should try this at home.