After bringing home a bag of six bagels to eat with my smoked salmon I ate one only to find afterward that the next day the rest of them had gone green.

But that’s okay; they were just a bag of plain grocery store bagels, not particularly great ones. I could make better bagels than that. I could make sourdough bagels.

I made my bagels based on a recipe by Kelsey of “Full of Days”, who in turn based her recipe on one by Jami of “An Oregon Cottage”. This time I wasn’t going to make the mistake I made last time; I used the bread machine to knead the dough and left it in to rise.

Remember the liquid I squeezed from my potaotes and onions when I made latkes? It has turned black from oxidization, but it is fine. It just tastes like fresh onion juice. Normally I like to use potato water in my bagels, which is water that potatoes have been boiled in, but I think this should have a similar effect, as well as adding a little onion flavor. I add a little extra gluten* to my flour, as well, because the potato juice looked very starchy.

While this was kneading I made myself a glass of almond nog with bourbon**.

I had to fast for bloodwork the next morning, so after 4 hours I put the risen dough in the fridge overnight and took it out in the morning so I could finish the baking when I got home. Four hours didn’t sound like enough time for sourdough to rise, but bagels are supposed to be dense, so I followed the recipe. And like Kelsey says, letting the dough sit in the fridge for a while allows more flavor to develop. I was out of yogurt-based cream cheese substitutes and didn’t want to waste good ricotta, so I decided to buy some real cream cheese and scallions. I was making sourdough bagels with onion juice in them, after all, they deserve it. I also picked up some toothpaste. I had the good fortune of dumpstering a full tube of toothpaste a couple months ago but that was running out.

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I shaped the bagels and let them rise again for an hour.

The recipe I’m using calls for baking soda* in the water when the bagels are boiled. In the past, I have used honey, but I’m intrigued by the use of baking soda because I’ve seen this method used to substitute spaghetti for ramen noodles, which are given their chewy texture by alkaline minerals in the dough. Honey is acidic, so I know that I’m doing something different to the dough, but I’m not sure what.

The bagels are brushed with an egg wash and topped with poppy seed, sesame seed, dried onion, coarse sea salt, and a little caraway seed. All of the toppings are store-bought. I have a pretty large collection of herbs and spices that have lasted me a long time. I saved the rest of the egg wash to eat later.

I baked them for about 17 minutes and ate one immediately. A bagel still warm from the oven should never be toasted.

The result is really everything I could possibly want in a bagel, though I expected them to be larger and they’re not perfectly round. But they’re chewy without being too dense, the bread is tangy with a hint of onion, and the toppings didn’t fall off.

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*Store bought

**Definitely store bought