I am late to the game, but have somewhat jumped on the sourdough train. My mom got into it in this past year, and when she went to Germany for a month, I was given the task of keeping her starter alive.

I figured, I might as well experiment and try making some bread. I used her recipe, which she was given by a lady who taught her how to make sourdough bread. I did ok, but after she got back, I realized I wasn’t doing the folds right.

Google could have told me that, but apparently because the bread was somewhat turning out, I just figured I needed to practice and didn’t bother looking up the actual steps.

I also accidentally doubled her starter, and I am very much a waste not, want not, type of person, so I split it and kept some for myself. Of course, this now leads to making all sorts of recipes that I have pinned.

Mom still gives me loaves of bread, so I haven’t purchased any of the baking items for that and instead experiment with “discard” recipes mostly. Again, discard seems like a waste, so I like any recipe that allows me to try out a sourdough base.

I love sun-dried tomato and asiago bagels. Unfortunately, nowhere seems to carry them anymore, so when I stumbled across a recipe for it, I thought it would be fun to try. So far my other trial recipes have seen great results!

I have made cinnamon buns, croissants, focaccia and rye bread. All of which, I would make again. I don’t bother sharing those since I follow a recipe that I have found for each of them.

The bagels however, are another story. I would like to share the tweaked and re-jigged recipe if it works out, because it utilizes so many great ingredients from the garden. I used garlic, onion, oregano and thyme. I topped it with plain cream cheese (which I will also try to make in the future) and some sliced cucumber. My next batch will use home-dried tomatoes as well, I just unfortunately didn’t have any for this initial attempt.

I had a successful failure with this recipe because it did turn out with some delicious, though grossly over-sized, bagels, but it was hit and miss throughout the process. I changed a lot as I went, resulting in being unsure what the end result was actually going to be. Luckily the end result is delicious, but I feel like I ended up changing so much of the recipe to get there.

These are something that I would make a few batches of and have in the freezer for when guests come to stay. Similar to the sourdough croissants, which freeze before baking, I may try want to try to freeze these prior to the cooking process so that I can have “fresh” bagels when we want them.

After much research online, it does look like a few people have frozen the dough prior to the water bath stage of the process. They will thaw it out for about 45 minutes before proceeding with the water bath then bake. Something I am going to try. Hopefully it will work out and I can share the process here!

Lastly, I also looked up a better way to roll the bagel. Every recipe I have tried has done the roll a ball, then pinch a hole in the centre using your thumb and finger. It never seems right to me because as it proofs, the hole closes back up. I finally found a great video that shows, what looks to be, a better process! The dough rolling starts at 4:00 in the video. I recommend it if you have also struggled with this. I will definitely be trying this next time!

The other thing that caught my attention in that video was weighing each piece of dough so that all the bagels would be of consistent size. This was definitely a point of contention for me with the recipe I followed because the bagels all ended up HUGE, but also of varying sizes. The recipe said it made 8 bagels but easily could have been cut down further to make 12. Kurt and I shared one, and it was plenty. Looking into it further, it looks like each piece should weigh approx. 125 grams. Again, this will be done in my next attempt.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this successful failure. Again lucky it was successful, but we just don’t share our failure’s much, so it seemed fitting to share this, then hopefully redeem it with a future recipe that incorporates some garden goodies!