Bagels - a Random recipe

This month's  Random Recipe Challenge at Belleau Kitchen is challenge #28 - Bread.

Now I don't seem to have much luck with my random recipes - there were Delia's dry sausages, then there was "solid soup", and most recently the spectacular disaster of the beancurd satay.  So I was starting to think that I was fated to produce a stream of failures.

This month's challenge being bread, I was hoping my random selection (which I did just from among my specific bread books and booklets, or I'd still have been checking books halfway through the next challenge!) would be the crumpets from Paul Hollywood's "Bread" because I'd just bought some rings to cook them in, but instead my random number generator brought me to the new magazine - I think it is a one-off - from the BBC Good Food stable called, surprisingly enough, "Bread". And when opened randomly, it took me to a recipe for bagels, which the magazine had published from "The Pink Whisk Guide to Bread Making" by Ruth Clemens. I've never made bagels before - all I knew about making them is that you have to boil them.

Well, that turned out to be sort-of right, but they are actually just poached for a couple of minutes before baking. They rise quite spectacularly while being poached.

Here they are after proving - the splits in the dough around the circumference had me worried as they hadn't been there when I shaped them.

After just a minute on each side of poaching, the splits had filled out again

Then egg-washed, seeded and baked they looked very tempting indeed

I couldn't resist tasting one while it was still warm. They have a lovely light, even crumb, a soft yet slightly chewy texture and I declare them a 100% success.

And about time too!