A Blueberry-Bagel Bonanza

C urrently, anyone who visits my apartment isn’t allowed to leave until she’s taken one or more blueberry bagels with her. In the last week and a half, I’ve made 44 such bagels, all of various hues and shapes — very few of which actually tasted of blueberry.

A year ago, I decided to try my hand at blueberry bagels, assuming that you could just take a plain bagel recipe and add frozen berries to the dough. As the saying goes about assuming . . . Well, perhaps my preparation for that attempt should’ve been more than a vague memory that berries in store-bought bagels were small. Feeling proud of this observation, I’d found frozen wild blueberries (which are tiny) at Trader Joe’s and mixed a cup or so of them into a plain King Arthur Baking bagel recipe. While the bagels were certainly a pretty, mottled purple, they didn’t have even a hint of blueberry flavor.

If memory serves, I tried again a few days later, this time combining elements of the King Arthur recipe with some from Baking with Butter (mainly, the addition of sugar and some vanilla extract). Still no luck. I gave up on bagels for a while, content to neither buy nor make them.

The bagel urge struck again last week, however, but I didn’t seem to learn quite the right lesson from my previous mistakes. Out came the King Arthur recipe again, but this time, I decided that blueberry jam would be my flavoring of choice. Surely, this more-concentrated concoction would give me the delicious fruitiness I desired in my bagels.

Take No. 1, unfortunately, was an unmitigated disaster.

You see, I’d decided to treat the dough as I would in a cinnamon roll recipe: Roll out the dough into a rectangle, spread the filling thinly on top, and spiral it into a log. For one thing, I included too much jam, and since I still had to roll the dough into a ball (instead of leaving it spiraled as you would for a cinnamon roll), my kitchen counter and hands were soon reminiscent of Act II, scene 2, of Macbeth.

Honestly, the dough rose fine, but the bagels themselves, after shaping and boiling (yes, you boil bagels before baking them — it’s an odd process), were dreadfully flat. And after baking, they had large, unappetizing pockets of jam weirdly mixed with the dough. Into the bin those went, and I began again the next day.

This time, I included the jam in the initial kneading process (done in the stand mixer, no Lady Macbeth moments this time), lessened the amount of liquid to account for the jam, and included some sugar and vanilla extract. This batch, while prettier and properly bagel-shaped, still lacked my longed-for blueberry flavor.

On the verge of writing about my disappointment, I realized that two failed batches of bagels do not an interesting essay make. Clearly, I needed to do some actual research and make more than one recipe. So back to the drawing board I went, and I came up with four blueberry-bagel-specific recipes. All of them used some combination of frozen, freeze-dried, fresh, or dried blueberries, so I high-tailed it to the store for the necessary supplies.

After successfully obtaining all but the freeze-dried berries, I set aside my Sunday afternoon for a baking extravaganza. I know 28 bagels is quite a lot, but after standing in the kitchen for over four hours, a number in the 50s or 60s might’ve felt more satisfying. Nevertheless, it was an exhilarating process, and I kneaded, roasted, soaked, and shaped the various berries and doughs, trying to keep the different recipes straight as I sorted among ingredients on my counter and toggled between tabs on my computer.

Each recipe was fairly distinct in its type of blueberry product, shaping method, and boiling process. Two of them included multiple kinds of blueberries, one of them had me shape the dough even before the first proof, and the different water baths called for everything from honey to brown sugar to diastatic malt powder. I’m proud to say that, despite my natural tendencies, I improvised only a few times and did manage to follow most of the recipes exactly — even down to the pre-baking egg wash on two of the batches.

All this experimenting fired my imagination, and during a lull in the bagel bonanza, I chatted with my roommate (also an experienced baker) about the possibility of using elements I’d learned during this process to create a cranberry-orange bagel à la Panera. You could use fresh and dried cranberries in the dough, and then create an orange streusel topping — similar to that of the well-loved cinnamon-crunch bagel — spreading it on just before baking.

I managed to make it through three recipes that day, and intended to make a pilgrimage to Trader Joe’s for the freeze-dried blueberries the next evening. By the end of Sunday, I could’ve made a fort out of my bagel collection, and they did look rather nice, all piled up on my coffee table.

The real test though, was the taste. The verdict? Recipe 1 was too flat, but had the most blueberry flavor. Recipe 2 had great shape and color, but almost no flavor. Recipe 3 didn’t have tons of flavor, but it was by far the prettiest.

And Recipe 4? I think it’ll have to wait. My oven — not to mention my feet — needs a break.