I discovered bagels relatively recently and they are now part of my favorites baking things. I already posted on a wholewheat bagel recipe. In this post, I extended the recipe by adding cinnamon and raisins to get cinnamon raisin bagels. On the universal scale of pleasure, no doubt it competes with fresh morning croissants.

For 8 bagels

• 550g flour (2/3 bread flour, 1/3 wholewheat)
• 20g sugar
• 1/4 tsp yeast
• 250g water
• 1 egg
• 10g salt
• 25g butter (room temperature)

Total weight 900g.

The additional ingredients for cinnamon raisin bagels:

• 1 Tbsp cinnamon
• ~80g of raisins

Preparation time: 20 minutes (preparing dough), 20 minutes (shaping), 30 minutes (boiling+baking)

In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients (except the butter and raisins) and mix the ingredients and knead for 2-3 minutes. Add the butter. Knead for 5 minutes until the dough is homogeneous and soft. Add raisins to the dough and knead until all the raisins are equally spread. Let the dough rest in the fridge for at least 6 hours. Take the dough out of the fridge and let it rise for about 8 hours, or until the dough has risen. Transfer dough to counter, divide into balls of 100g. Roll the balls, let them sit and shape the bagels. To shape the bagels, flour the counter, take a ball and place it on the counter, flatten the ball a little bit, insert your thumb in the middle until your reach the counter, with your thumb now in the middle of the bagel, from there you have to stretch the dough to enlarge the bagel, you can do this by inserting your two index fingers in the hole and spinning them to progressively enlarge the hole. Place the shaped bagels on a towel (linen), cover them and let them rest and rise for 30mins to an hour. Meanwhile bring to a boil water in a large pot. Add maple syrup, salt and baking soda (1Tbsp). Boil the bagels for 1min30s on each side. You can boil them by 2 or 3 at the same time. Take the bagels out of the boiling water and place them on a grid. Preheat oven to 450F, insert the bagels in the oven and steam the oven at the very beginning. Flip the baking sheet after 10 mins, and cook them for 5 to 10 more minutes (total time of 15 to 20 mins).

It is easy to double this recipe to prepare a batch of 16 bagels and freeze them.