Boulean Logic
A baking blog

Mostly Montréal-style Bagels

I'm a big fan of Montréal-style bagels. They're a bit sweeter and denser than the more common New York-style bagels, and I think they make better sandwiches. The main problem is that I haven't found anyone in the US who's willing to sell me a Montréal-style bagel, so I decided screw it, I'll make them myself.

There are three things that make a bagel Montréal-style:

  1. Montreal-style bagels generally have egg in the dough. Sometimes there's also no salt in the dough, but that weirds me out.
  2. While New York-style bagels are boiled in water with a barley malt syrup, Montréal-style bagels use honey in the water. This is where the sweetness comes from.
  3. Montréal-style bagels are cooked in a wood-fired oven. I don't have access to a wood-fired oven, so we'll have to be non-traditional about this one.

I mainly followed this recipe, but I cut the maple syrup in half. As far as I can tell, the maple syrup is a quirk of this particular recipe and not a standard bagel ingredient. I also increased the boiling time from 45 seconds per side to 1 minute. Here's how they turned out:

They needed an extra ~5 minutes or so in the oven in order to get the nice browned tops, and the crust was still a bit thin. We dipped the bagels in sesame seeds right after taking them out of the oven rather than using egg wash and sprinkling seeds on top, which meant we wasted a truly heinous amount of sesame seeds. But my housemates seemed to like them quite a bit!

I made the bagels again the morning before Work Weekend, with a few changes:

  1. I increased the boiling time to 2 minutes per side
  2. I added a teaspoon of baking soda to the boiling water
  3. I brushed the bagels with an egg wash and sprinked sesame seeds rather than dipping them.

Overall I think these were good changes. The crust was crispier and thicker this time. I think I went a bit too hard on the egg wash, though. Some of the bagels came out of the oven with chunks of scrambled egg on them. In all the work weekend chaos I forgot to take a photo of that batch of bagels!