Not All Heroes Wear Capes
Not all heroes wear capes. Some of them just make bagels.
Alright maybe I’m not a hero, but the look in my daughter’s eyes when she woke up and found out that I had made her some homemade bagels before she woke up on a Saturday morning made me feel like one. When COVID-19 shut the world down in 2020, I (like so many others) spent a lot of my free time baking. And during that time, I had perfected bagels. I made them so often that I had memorized the recipe and was happily delivering them out to neighbors and family members. And true to nature, my carb-loving queen loved those bagels. After she was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in April 2021, I cut back a little bit on how often I made them for her, despite her requesting them. Her blood sugar would shoot straight up and stay there for hours afterwards, and I couldn’t stand the thought of her body being hurt by a food that I had made her. A few months later came the celiac diagnosis, and at that point I gave up baking them all together.
It’s been almost 2 years now since I’ve made a bagel from scratch.
Two years into her diabetes diagnosis, and we’ve become much better at figuring out how to bolus for different items. I’ve become much more aggressive with bolusing upfront and not being so fearful of a low as I was 2 years ago. She also has her insulin pump, which allows us to extend her bolus—- again helping with blood sugar control. So when she out of the blue asked about making bagels the other day, I figured why not give it a shot?
I did my homework. The gluten containing bagels I made before used bread flour—-obviously not going to happen with these unless I made a mix of flours specifically for this recipe. I was looking for something that I could use the 1:1 all purpose gluten-free flours because I have plenty of that on hand. I read through probably at least 15-20 different recipes. All of them were essentially the same recipe that I had used before, but instead of bread flour swapped the 1:1 gluten-free flour. The reviews weren’t great on most of these recipes.
So I went back and revisited the website that has yet to fail me with any of her gluten-free recipes. Chef Alina is a miracle worker——she doesn’t just give you a substitution for a regular recipe with a gluten-free one. She gives you an amazing, fool-proof recipe that happens to also be gluten-free. What a difference it makes when you start to change the way you’re thinking and bake to the ingredients that you’re using——not just trying to adapt the recipe that you’re used to.
Chef Alina has a lot of free recipes on available on her website. I’ve also purchased her digital cookbook, which unfortunately didn’t come with her bagel recipe. To get that, you had to purchase one of her classes—-which is basically a recorded video of her going through the entire process of baking whatever item it is that you’re trying to make. In this case, bagels and bialys. I actually didn’t want to buy the course, because I knew how to make bagels already. But I sucked it up and bought it because I wanted to have her recipe.
Silly me. I begrudgingly watched her tutorial mainly out of principle because I had paid for it, and man I felt dumb afterwards. I thought I was so smart with understanding finally that you need to bake to your ingredients and blah blah blah. But I only had it half-way. Gluten-free baking also requires different techniques. There’s not a chance I could’ve picked up this dough and shaped it into it’s classic bagel shape doing things like I had before. They don’t proof the same way. They really just don’t behave the same at all.
My homework was finished. I was ready to give it another go. This weekend I set my alarm and woke up early Saturday morning while my kids were still sleeping, and I made the bagels. My first attempt at gluten-free bagels…. and they were everything we were looking for. Chewy on the outside, doughy on the inside. And the way my daughter’s eyes lit up when she took that first bite told me this was exactly the recipe I was looking for.
