We have a bit of a confession to make!
For quite some time now we’ve had a recipe on our site for whole wheat bagels. Bagels are best made with bread flour, so we listed bread flour as one of the ingredients, with a warning not to substitute it with all purpose (plain) flour.
Well, we had an urge to make some of these delicious bagels the other day but there was no bread flour to be found on our island. So – breaking our own rule – we used all purpose flour instead. And you know what? The bagels were wonderful – perfectly tasty and with hardly any difference in texture at all!
So to all of you who may have skipped our bagel recipe because you either didn’t have bread flour (or didn’t feel like going to get any) – we apologize! And we have amended the recipe to reflect our new-found discovery.
To all those who think that these homemade bagels are not worth the effort…
… we urge you to give them a try – they are truly yummy and great fun to make. We KNOW the recipe looks long and drawn out, but it’s actually very simple.
We make them with the help of one of our daughters – she loves the process of making the dough, then shaping it, then boiling it (the step responsible for the bagels’ unique chewy texture), then finally baking it. It’s a team effort that we all enjoy (although you certainly don’t need a team to make them, so don’t worry if you don’t have any little kitchen helpers available just yet!).
For us, baking bagels has also been something of a necessity – we think they’re a wonderful finger food for baby, with just the right amount of chewiness to make them something that our little teethers have happily gnawed away on for ages.
Unfortunately, they’re not always available here on our island (the reason we’ve turned our hands to learning how to make almost everything ourselves). And a whole wheat version is impossible to find.
Our recipe mixes whole wheat and white flour to give the benefits of whole grain AND the slightly lighter texture that the white flour provides. The result is so tasty that you won’t look at store-bought again!
Try our whole wheat bagel recipe today, which you’ll find
here on our Infant Finger Food page