3-Hour Homemade Plain Bagels (2024)

Is there anything better in the morning than freshly toasted bagels slathered in cream cheese or melted butter? If you answered yes, then you must know that the correct answer is freshly toasted homemade bagels slathered in cream cheese or melted better. Congrats, you win points.

But how hard is it to make homemade bagels, really?

The answer is VERY EASY. Like, SHOCKINGLY EASY.

I promise.

This is a quick and easy bagel recipe that can be done in the span of a lazy morning or afternoon without any specialty ingredients. It also uses an easy, foolproof shaping method.

For a more traditional overnight bagel recipe that uses barley malt syrup and bread flour, check out my recipe for hand-rolled New York-style bagels!

Why You'll Love This Easy Bagel Recipe

Before you know it you'll be impressing all your best brunch friends with a fresh tray of homemade bagels sprinkled with everything bagel topping or finding that you suddenly have time to eat a complete breakfast every morning because it turns out bagels are a lot more fun to look forward to than eating that granola bar you usually grab on your way out the door.

Once you know how to make your own quick and easy plain bagels, you'll make them over and over again because while you'll know how secretly easy they are to make, your friends won't — and getting to bask in those impressed reactions? Priceless.

Soon you'll be making pretzel bagels, garlic bagels, blueberry bagels, egg bagels, and so much more! I even use these plain bagels to make homemade bagel chips!

Try my mini bagels recipe for an adorably smaller version of this bagel recipe.

About This Recipe

Making bagels is what started my love of bread making. You can draw a direct line from me learning to making a bagel recipe I saw on Tumblr back in 2014 to me going to pastry school in 2020 to you reading this blog post right now.

That very first bagel recipe I made was from Kamran Siddiqi at the Sophisticated Gourmet and though the bagels I made were lumpy and misshapen, they tasted amazing. I was hooked. The more I made them, the prettier they became.

I've adapted that recipe only slightly to share it with you here. The proportions and measurements are mostly the same, but I've made some adjustments to the method over the years, and have included a lot more information about the ingredients, tools, and the techniques for shaping bagels which I hope you find helpful at the start of your own bagel journey.

Also, even though homemade bagels are way easier to make if you have a stand mixer with a dough hook, I've made bagels many times without a mixer (I JUST LOVE HOMEMADE BAGELS THAT MUCH, OK?) and while it requires a bit more upper-body strength for the kneading, they turn out great that way too.

There are some recipes I'd go nowhere near if I couldn't use a mixer, and I would tell you if I didn't think they were worth doing without a mixer, but that's not this recipe.

Homemade bagels are worth making, with or without a mixer.

A Brief History of the Bagel

If you want the full history of the bagel, look no further than Maria Baliska's excellent book The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread which charts the bagel's turbulent sociopolitical and socioeconomic journey from Jewish bagel peddlers in 17th century Poland to Europe, eventually crossing the Atlantic to New York City and the United States (did you know that the bagel didn't enter into mainstream popularity in the U.S. until the 1970s???).

And lest you think the politics and geography of bagels is less fraught today, the NYC vs. Montreal bagel rivalry is still going strong.

Today New York and Montreal bagels are so different that they barely qualify as the same species. New York bagels are bigger, more pliable (New York City tap water has very low levels of calcium carbonate and magnesium, which produces softer gluten), and salty.

Montreal bagels are sweeter (bakers add sugar to the dough, which, once rolled, is poached in honey-infused water), smaller, and crispier, with a chewy interior. Many Montreal bakers still hand-roll their bagels and cook them in the same wood-burning ovens they used when they first built their shops.

Why the Montreal bagel is the superior bagel — The Takeout

Traditional bagels are a much more laborious process than what you'll find here. This is a very easy, very simple beginner-friendly recipe.

Making bagels the "right way" is a two or three day process, with long overnight cold proofing in the fridge. Traditional bagels use barley malt syrup in the dough, and sometimes in the boiling water too. And if you want to be a real stickler about it, they must always be hand rolled from a long rope and baked on wooden boards wrapped in burlap and soaked in water.

So, no, this is not a traditional bagel recipe. But it is a great first bagel recipe. If you're new to bagel making, if you're new to bread making, if you're new to working with yeast, this simple and straightforward plain bagel recipe is a great place to start.

Ingredient Notes

Here are the ingredients you'll need to make your very own homemade plain bagels. See the recipe card at the end of this blog post for the quantities!

• All-Purpose Flour- Bagels are traditionally made with a higher protein bread flour which gives them that chewy texture, but I use King Arthur Baking's all-purpose flour which has a relatively high protein content for an all-purpose flour. If you're using another brand of flour (like a generic store brand flour) you may have better results with bread flour.
• Instant Yeast- Sometimes called "rapid rise" yeast. This yeast does not need to be bloomed in water and can be added directly to the dry ingredients.
• Salt- I useDiamond Crystal Kosher Saltwhich half as salty as other brands of salt. If measuring salt by weight, it doesn't matter what brand of salt you use. But if you're measuring by volume and using a different brand of salt, even a different brand of kosher salt, cut the amount of salt in half.
• Sugar- Plain granulated sugar is all you need here.
• Water- Lukewarm to the touch. Not hot. If you want to be precise, it should be between 100-110F.
• Egg- For the egg wash! The egg wash gives bagels their shiny browned crusts. If you're adding any toppings to your homemade mini bagels, the egg wash will also help them stick.

How to Make Plain Bagel Dough

To make the dough itself add all your dry ingredients to a bowl —including your instant yeast! —mix them to combine. Pour the warm water into the center of the mixing bowl.

Start the mixer on low speed and let the dough hook do it's thing, pausing to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed to push the flour around the edges into the middle.

At this first stage you're just mixing the dough. The goal is to get the ingredients to combine and collect on the dough hook.

• If you the dough is wet and sticking to the sides of the bowl, tap in a tablespoon or two of flour as needed until the dough stops sticking.
• If the dough seems really dry and like it won't come together after about 5 minutes, dribble a teaspoon of water onto the dry bits in the bowl and keep mixing. Repeat only as needed. It's very easy to accidentally add too much water — resist adding it unless it really needs it.

Once the dough comes together on the dough hook, increase the speed to medium and knead for 3-5 minutes until the dough is smooth.

After mixing, the bagel dough will pull clean from the sides of the bowl and gather on the dough hook but will look lumpy and messy.

After kneading the dough, it will be smooth and elastic, slightly stretch and tacky to the touch but not sticky.

Shape the dough into a ball by tucking the edges under until you have a smooth top. Place it back in the mixing bowl, cover and let it dough rise in a warm spot (70-75F) for an hour.

The dough will just about double in size, but may not quite get there. The best way to test if your dough is ready is to use the fingerprint test.

The Fingerprint Test: Gently press a finger into the dough. If the indentation fills in quickly and completely, the dough needs more time to rise. If the indentation fills in slowly and partially, the dough is ready! And if the dough completely deflates and collapses under your finger, it has over-proofed.

A Low Hydration Dough

Bagel dough is a low-hydration dough which means the ratio of water to flour is very low. For example, when making artisanal sourdough or ciabatta with a very airy, open crumb, bakers often work with doughs that have a hydration level of 75% or more.

Doughs that have high water content are sticky and harder to work with. They're excellent for artisan breads where you want a lot of rise and large air pockets. That's not at all what you want when you're making bagels.

Bagels have a tight crumb with small air pockets. That comes from the way you knead the dough and knock the air out, and from a low amount of water in the dough.

This particular bagel recipe has a hydration level of 60%. It's a dense, smooth, and cohesive dough that should easily form a ball. You're looking for something that is smooth and elastic and slightly tacky to the touch but that doesn't stick to your fingers.

Once your bagel dough is kneaded, put it in a lightly greased bowl, cover it, and let it rise for an hour.

How to Shape Homemade Bagels

Most bagel recipes I've seen are for hand-rolled bagels, meaning you roll a long rope of dough, then loop it over your hand and roll it again, pressing the ends together to form the bagel shape. There are benefits to that method — it compresses the gluten network inside the bagels, giving you a tighter, denser, chewier crumb. But it requires an overnight rise to allow the ends of the rope to seal back together. (If you're interested in giving that a try, check out my recipe for New York-style hand-rolled bagels.)

For this plain bagel recipe, we're going to use an easier method affectionately known as the "roll and poke" method.

After the initial 1-hour rise, deflate the dough to knock some of the air out of it, then divide the dough into 8 equal pieces. I recommend using a kitchen scale for this step so that your bagels are all the same size.

If you combined a few pieces of dough to get the right size dough ball, stack the smaller piece(s) on top of the largest piece. Gently flatten the piece of dough against a lightly floured surface, then tuck the edges up into the middle, pinching them together to form a smooth surface on the underside of the dough.

Flip the dough ball over and cup your hand around it, with your pinkie-finger flush against the counter. Slide your hand toward your body, dragging the dough ball with it. You'll see the front of the dough snag on the counter slightly, pushing the edge under itself and creating surface tension on top of the dough.

The dough will form an oval shape, so rotate it 90 degrees and repeat to get a nice circle. You don't always need to do this, but it's especially helpful if your dough is on the dry side or not sticking together well.

Once you've shaped all eight pieces of dough into little boules and let them rest for a few minutes, dip your thumb in flour and poke it through the bottom of the boule until it comes out the other side.

This is a great opportunity to push any extra edges or seams on the bottoms into the center of the bagel, sealing them shut. Once your thumb is all the way through, wiggle your other thumb in as well so the backs of your thumbs are pressed against each other, and start gently stretching and squeezing the dough until the hole is at least the same width as the sides of the bagel.

The bagel dough will shrink back when it rests (10 minutes!) before boiling and the hole will shrink again during boiling and baking, so don't be stingy in your stretching.

Boiling Homemade Bagels

I call the boiling and baking process "bagel botox" because it's this step that gives you that gorgeous smooth, shiny, taut bagel crust.

The boiling process gelatinizes the starches in the crust, setting them in place while also activating the yeast and air inside the dough to encourage the bagels to expand. The gelatinized crust will also prevent the bagels from expanding too much in the oven.

The boiled bagels will have a slight texture to them, but will completely smooth out in the oven. So if you're feeling like your bagels look funky after shaping them, don't worry... bagel botox is here to save the day.

Right before boiling, stretch the bagels one more time. This will prevent the bagel holes from shrinking closed as they bake!

You can boil your bagels for as little as 30 seconds or as long as 2 minutes per side. I usually go for about a minute per side, but it's really up to you.

The longer you boil them, the thicker the crust will be and the chewier the texture of the bagels will be. If you boil them for 30 seconds per side, the crust will be thinner and more flexible, allowing them to rise more in the oven.

You can control the texture and size of your finished bagels depending on how long you choose to boil them, but again, like the choice between all purpose or bread flour ... the difference here is, well, see for yourself:

Some people add baking soda or barley malt extract to the water before baking (it helps the bagels brown and can change the flavor slightly), but this recipe is so much simpler than that —you literally just boil them in plain old regular water. Easy!

Use a wire spider to remove the bagels from the hot water. Arrange the boiled bagels on a lined sheet pan, and you're ready to add toppings!

Bagel Toppings

If you're planning on using any bagel toppings, you'll want to apply them after boiling but before baking.

To get your toppings to stick to the bagels while they bake, make an egg wash by whisking together 1 egg + ¼ teaspoon of salt + 2 teaspoon of water and then use a silicone or pastry brush to brush the boiled bagels with the egg wash.

Then sprinkle with the topping of your choosing! Even if you aren't going to use a topping, I still recommend using an egg wash to get that beautiful shiny crust.

If you love the flavor of a topping but hate that it's only on one side of the bagel, mix up to ¼ cup right into the dry ingredients when you make your dough.

I love doing this with everything bagel topping in particular, because it infuses the whole dough with garlicky, oniony goodness that tastes amazing when sliced, toasted, and slathered in melty butter. Just make sure the topping doesn't include salt, because salt will throw off the chemistry of the dough.

All Purpose vs. Bread Flour

The original recipe for these bagels calls for bread flour, as do most bagel recipes. Why? Because bread flour is a high protein flour. It absorbs more liquid than all purpose flour and will result in a tighter crumb (aka the texture and size of air pockets of the inside of your bagel or loaf of bread).

As we've already discussed — bagel dough is a low-hydration dough and we want it to be stiff, smooth, and not sticky at all. Working with bread flour will help you get those truly optimal results.

That said, you absolutely can use plain old regular all purpose flour to make your bagels. You will probably never even notice a difference, unless you were to see them side-by-side. Unless you're someone who uses bread flour regularly, there is really no need to spend the money on a specialty flour when all purpose will do just fine.

For more side-by-side comparisons of bread flour v. all purpose flour, check out this King Arthur Baking blog post.

Active Dry Yeast vs. Instant Yeast

Active Dry and Instant yeast are technically the same thing —meaning, they are both saccharomyces cerevisiae, a single-celled living organism used for leavening bread and doughs.

The only difference between the two types of yeast is that Active Dry yeast granules have a little coating around them which needs to be dissolved to reveal the yeast inside. The yeast can't start working until that coating has dissolved.

This is why Active Dry yeast is often bloomed in water before use —it dissolves that shell to expose the yeast!

But because of this extra little shell around the Active Dry yeast granules, you'll need to use slightly more Active Dry yeast to get the same effect as using Instant Yeast.

To calculate how much Active Dry yeast to use, increase the amount of Instant yeast by 25%. So for this recipe, you'd be using 7.5 grams of active dry yeast. Most scales can't measure that precisely, so aim for 7 or 8 grams of active dry yeast and you'll be just fine here.

You can add the Active Dry yeast directly to the dry ingredients just like you do the Instant Yeast. Your bagel dough just might need an extra 20-30 minutes of rising time because that little shell needs time to dissolve.

Kneading Bagel Dough By Hand

Don't have a stand mixer? No worries! Kneading bagel dough by hand requires a bit of upper body strength and takes a little bit longer, but is totally possible.

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients. Pour the warm water into the center.

Start by mixing the water, slowly incorporating more flour from the sides into the center until a messy dough begins to form. Pinch and squeeze the dough, folding it over itself until all the water has absorbed and there aren't any big dry patches or clumps of flour.

Turn the dough out on to a clean, lightly floured surface. Knead for 8 to 10 minutes, folding the dough over itself, flattening it with the heel of your hand, rotating 90 degrees and repeating. Dust in more flour as needed if the dough is sticky. Keep kneading until the dough is smooth, elastic, and slightly tacky but not sticky.

Set a timer for the kneading step —kneading takes a lot of work and you'll get tired and think time is up sooner than it is!

Follow the rest of the recipe as written!

Bagel-Making Timeline

• 10 Minutes: Mixing and kneading dough
• 60 Minutes: Letting dough rest, rise, and double in size
• 10 Minutes: Divide and shape your bagels
• 10 Minutes: Letting shaped bagels rest again
• 5-10 Minutes: Boiling bagels max 2 mins per side
• 20 Minutes: Baking!

Even if you take the longest amount of time on each of those steps, this recipe clocks in at ~2 hrs. The process may take you longer at first when you're still new to the shaping process which is why I've written this recipe as being three hours, but once you get the hang of it you'll breeze through it.

Practical Tips & Recipe Notes

• If you're working in a dry environment or making bagels in winter when there's less natural moisture in the air, you may need to add up to an additional ¼ cup of water to the dough before kneading. If you do need to add water, measure out your ¼ cup, but then use a teaspoon measure to slowly drizzle it in, stopping when the dough comes together and there are no large, noticeable dry spots. It's a lot easier to add water to a dry dough than add flour to a too-wet dough, so always err on the side of too-little water, especially with bagel dough. If you do end up with a dough that's too wet, add flour a ~⅛ cup at a time, giving it time to incorporate and absorb the excess liquid before adding more.
• Be careful not to tear the dough when you stretch the bagels out. Bagel dough isn't like play-dough or pie dough, where you can simply combine all the scraps and stick 'em back together. Tearing your dough destroys those beautiful strong gluten strands you spent so much time kneading. When the dough rests, those raw edges and seams will begin forming new gluten connections, so don't worry about them not being perfectly smooth all the way around. This is one of the hardest things to get right (and honestly, your bagels will still taste great even if you don't get this perfectly) so just know that it's something you'll get better at with practice.

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