These homemade bagels are just 2 ingredients! The recipe doesn’t require any yeast or proofing. You can have fresh chewy and soft bagels in less than an hour.
I am super excited to share this recipe with you today. I came across this easy bagel recipe recently and I immediately wanted to try it. This recipe combines two of my favorite things: recipes that are 4 ingredients-or-less and bagels!
Apparently, this recipe has been popular in the Weight Watchers Community, though I found out about it from Skinnytaste.
The two ingredients are plain nonfat Greek yogurt and self-rising flour (you can easily make your own if you don’t have self-rising flour.) I previously made a super easy pizza crust with similar ingredients so this recipe looked promising.
I have a serious thing for bagels. I spent my childhood in New York, where we ate bagels nearly every weekend. I miss NY bagels like crazy and always bring a few dozen back when I visit or ask for them when someone from NY is visiting me.
These are not NY bagels. I didn’t expect them to be. But they do taste like a version of bagels and are surprisingly good.
Much like traditional bagels, they have a thicker chewy skin and an airy and chewy interior. They do have a slight tangy taste from the yogurt. It makes them taste almost like sourdough bagels. These bagels don’t expand to be quite as large as traditional bagels but they are a great personal size. You can top with whatever toppings you like. I actually love my bagels plain but I also made some variations. I knew that bottle of everything bagel seasoning from Trader Joe’s would come in handy!
- A few recipes I found boiled the bagels before baking them. Traditional NY bagels are boiled first but I didn’t feel that it was necessary for this recipe. While it did expand the bagels and make them bigger, they also took a lot longer to bake and they were not as smooth and round because of the boiling.
- You can knead the dough by hand or use a stand mixer with a dough hook attachment. I prefer the stand mixer because it’s less labor and it doesn’t require as much flour coating so the bagel comes out lighter and airier. You do need to watch the mixer carefully. As soon as the dough comes together in one ball and is no longer sticking to the sides of the bowl, it’s ready. If you over-knead it, it will actually start becoming too sticky to work with again.
- Make sure you use a brand that makes a thick Greek strained yogurt. Not all brands offer the same consistency. I used Fage for these.
