Homemade Bagels Recipe | Easy Vegan Buns (2024)

FAQs

What makes bagels vegan? ›

In their most basic form, bagels are vegan, made from just flour, water, yeast, and salt. But other non-vegan ingredients—including dairy, honey, and eggs, along with less easily identifiable animal products—commonly appear in commercially produced bagels.

If your dough is too wet, it'll create large holes in the crumb of the dough and your bagels will be more like French bread, with a fluffy interior (see top photo). When too much flour is kneaded in, bagels become dense, hard and tough, instead of crisp and chewy.

Don't boil the bagels until they float.

If it doesn't, let the bagel dough proof for an additional 30 minutes, or until one floats. This test ensures that the dough contains plenty of air – if you cook it too soon, your homemade bagels will be dense.

If you want chewy, dense bagels, bread flour is best, which has a higher protein content than all-purpose flour. Be careful not to allow the balls of dough to over-rise before the shaping and boiling process, or the result will be somewhat flattened bagels with a wrinkled surface.

Bagels. Vegan bagels include everything, plain, blueberry, and sesame varieties. While Panera doesn't offer a dairy-free cream cheese spread, you don't have to eat your bagel plain! You may be able to snag some avocado or hummus to round out your brekkie handheld.

Since eating yeast does not cause it to suffer and involves no animal exploitation or cruelty, yeast is typically considered a vegan food. Although, a very small minority of vegans may still avoid it, as it is a living organism.

Ingredients for Homemade Bagels:

Bread flour – The higher protein level in bread flour helps to create that chewy texture that makes bagels so delightful.

What you're trying to do, by boiling or steaming bagels before baking, is to kill the yeast, so the bagels won't rise in the oven and become puffy, rather than staying rather dense and chewy. You're also adding a very thin coating of sugar—malt, in this case—which gives bagels their distinctive shiny crust. Eureka!

Baking soda makes the water more alkaline, giving the bagels a pretzel-like quality that contributes to their chewiness. Just one teaspoon helps the bagels develop a shiny, dark-brown exterior as they bake. One thing to keep in mind: Keep the water bath at a constant simmer.

If you plan to enjoy your bagels within a week, a zip-top bag can help maintain freshness. Just be sure that they cool down first, as warm bagels can sweat and lose their crisp exterior in the bag. You'll also want to ensure there's minimal air inside the bag; otherwise, the bagels might turn hard.

Why do you put honey in water for bagels? ›

Now unlike most bread, bagels are unique because they are boiled before baked in the oven! Add honey and baking soda to the boiling water in a large pot. This will help give the bagels a nice sheen and golden brown color when out of the oven.

While my recipe aims for 24 to 36 hours of proofing in the fridge, I've successfully gone up to 40 hours. Any longer than that, though, and the entrapped gases beneath the surface of the crust will start to slip away, creating a slightly porous/matte crust with fewer blisters.

If you're looking for signs: they should have a golden-brown crust, feel light and not heavy or dense, and the bottom should be crispy and golden-brown, as well. Sometimes when bagels are not cooked all the way, the bottom of the bagels will still be white and soft.

To help soften a hard bagel, simply wrap it in a moist paper towel and microwave it for 15 seconds. You can also set the bagel on a microwave-safe plate, then surround it with a few water drops or lightly mist it and put it in the microwave for 30 seconds.

Regular bagels are vegan, but some types may include extra flavors, additives, or fillings that are animal-derived and thus not vegan. These include honey, eggs, or dairy in the dough, as well as cheese, meats, or fish in the fillings.

You know those bagels that are very shiny and almost a bit thick on top? Well those bagels may have a light egg wash applied. Sometimes bakers like to add an egg wash after boiling the bagels, before adding the toppings and before baking. It's totally unnecessary, but definitely can happen.

Normally, bagel dough does not contain eggs. Egg bagels do actually get their special name from the addition of eggs to the mix before baking! They often also contain a bit of sugar and yellowing coloring.

Enzymes. Although the enzymes used in bread seem to generally be fungal-based, there are several non-vegan enzymes used in commercial bread production. This includes one such ingredient called phospholipase, an enzyme derived from pig pancreatic tissue.