Directions

• All set! I prepared and weighed all my ingredients. I used ready-cooked beets, but for a more intense color you can use raw beets. In this way, the bagels will end up with a dusty pink color. Let’s get started!
• Add the flour to the bowl and make a well in the middle of it. Add yeast, sugar and a little warm water, or even milk. Bagel recipes often include sour dough, but I didn’t have and didn’t have the patience to make it. After the yeast was activated, I added the rest of the ingredients and started kneading gently.
• Turn the formed dough onto a lightly floured table. It will still be sticky, so I continued kneading and added about 100 g more flour. The dough is now smooth, non-sticky and firm to the touch. I transferred it to an oiled bowl and left it to rise for 1 and a half hours.
• it’s time to shape my beetroot bagels. I put the risen dough again on the floured table and divided it into 9 pieces. I did not use the scale, although indicated, so you have equal bagels. Knead each piece of dough using the stretch and fold method, at the end obtaining 9 balls of dough.
• I then took each sphere and gave it the shape of a bagel, making a hole in the middle. After I finished shaping the beetroot bagels, I placed them in a tray, covered them with a towel (or foil) and left them to rise for another 30-40 minutes.
• In a large pot I put water to boil. As soon as it boils, I added the bagels one by one and cooked them 1-2 minutes on each side. Do not crowd the pot! I removed the beetroot bagels with a slotted spoon and placed them on a cotton towel to absorb the excess water.
• I placed the bagels in the tray again, with baking paper, and brushed them with egg mixed with 2 tablespoons of milk. Above I chose to press a mix of seeds, you can replace this mix with any seeds you want or you can leave them as they are.
• We bake them in the preheated oven at 200°C for 15-20 minutes. When they are evenly browned, take them out of the oven, let them cool down for a few minutes and serve them. When they are warm, the skin is very crispy, when they cool down, the skin becomes elastic.
• While the beetroot bagels were cooling a little, I prepared the rest of the ingredients for the sandwich. I started by frying the bacon. In a bowl, I mixed cream cheese with beetroot and added crispy bacon cubes on top of them. Cut off some slices of tomatoes and wash your salad.
• I chose to add some scrambled eggs to my sandwich. I cut a bagel in half, spread it with cream cheese and beetroot, then add whatever vegetables you want (tomatoes, spinach, cucumbers), eggs, slices of fried bacon and add the bagel cover on top.
• I kept leftover bagels in a bag so they wouldn’t harden, or in a bread box. The next day I made sandwiches again just to test the flexibility and taste of the bagels. This time, after cutting them in half, I heated the slices a little in the toaster. Bingo! A real treat!