The Amazing Floating Bagels

Tiffany and I made bagels last weekend. I posted pictures on Facebook to impress our friends and then pretended making bagels was nothing to be impressed about. But really even we were impressed. Not because it's hard. We were impressed at how easy it was and at the awe-inspiring power of having bagel-making capacity in our very-own kitchen. Dangerous.

When you're as panicky a cook as me, you begin to expect a certain level of mediocrity. I like cooking, so mediocrity is a fair trade off (for me at least--if Tiffany ever starts a blog to tell her side of the story, maybe we'll hear it's not such a fair trade off). I love making bread, but my dough never rises the way my recipes say it should rise. I'm okay with that. It tastes good.

Anyway, when Tiffany and I read that our bagels were supposed to float in the pot of boiling water we put them into before baking them, we rolled our eyes at each other and pulled out our tongs, prepared to rescue the sunken pseudo-circles of dough from the deep-end.

But you know what?

Maybe a watched pot doesn't boil, but bagels in a watched pot of boiling water really do float. Not at first. No, at first they sunk straight to the bottom while we hovered nervously with the tongs. But then... one by one, they popped up to the top, bouncing like little rafts in a wave pool.

"Look!" we screamed at each other. "They're floating!"

It was a major triumph in our kitchen. The tastier triumph? Eating the amazing floating bagels.