More Cheese More Chocolate

It’s about time for something healthy on here, isn’t it?  As someone who could eat a bagel at least once a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, finding a good recipe for healthier bagels was a dream come true.  I’ve played around with adding whole wheat flour to bagels in the past, but these are more serious than that.  See that “100%” in the post title?  The only flour that’s used here is whole wheat flour.  Yep, I told you they were serious.  I’ll admit that I used white whole wheat flour when I ran out of regular whole wheat flour, but it’s my understanding that they’re about the same nutrition-wise.  While these aren’t going to prevent me from eating white flour bagels, it’s nice to know that I can keep eating one of my favorite foods, even when coming down from a fried chicken and cheesy pasta high.

I found several whole wheat bagel recipes, but what sold me on this particular one was the fact that, like my go-to bagel recipe, it’s from Peter Reinhart.

Recipe: 100% Whole Wheat Bagels

Tips/changes I made:

• Make the soaker and the biga and the same time, preferably the night before you want bagels.
• When combining the biga and starter for the final dough, you can break them into more than 12 pieces.  Unless there’s some reason given in the original recipe for making only 12 pieces, I think the dough combines more quickly with a greater number of smaller pieces.
• I made eight bagels instead of six.
• I boiled the bagels for about a minute per side instead of 30 seconds.  In the recipe I’ve used before, a longer boiling time meant a chewier bagel, and I assumed it would be the same for the wheat version.
• Next time I plan to reduce the baking time to about 15 minutes total, at most.  I baked this batch for maybe 20 minutes (still shorter than the time suggested in the recipe), and they were slightly overdone.  The fact that I made eight smaller bagels instead of six giant ones was probably a factor, but I still think the baking time is too long.

All of those tweaks aside, these were good bagels!  I love traditional bagels, but sometimes I want a heartier bread.  Now I can have hearty but still have a bagel.  Win!

Cream cheese tastes just as delicious on a whole wheat bagel as it does on a white bagel.

So do peanut butter and jelly, in case you were wondering.  Don’t trust me, though.  Try them yourself!