Flax Bagels – Two Ways

Last week I went to my best friend’s wedding in Berkeley. I love the Bay Area, with its multitudes of environmentally responsible, health conscious, hipster foodies, with the teeming spread of hidden restaurant gems, and hole-in-the-wall treasures. While I was there, my friends introduced me to a place called Beauty’s Bagels.

Oh dear sweet Bagel… the 2.5 days that I was there, I visited Beauty’s for 3 meals. When I was in college, my mother owned a Bagel shop. It was one of those business ventures that had heart, but not sound business strategy. I was broken hearted when she had to close it down, because there’s nothing in the world better than a hot from the oven, springy, chewy, hard on the outside and melty on the inside bagel. I love every kind of bagel imaginable–from toasted beauties with whipped fresh schmear, to fresh bagel sandwiches, to your traditional Lox and cream cheese, to the one of a kind “Chicken and Bagel” that was Beauty’s specialty.

So I indulged…while I could. But moving back to reality, how can I re-create the bagel sans the wheat, and not lose on texture and flavor? I found the answer lurking around the web: Flax Bagels.

Here’s a (slightly modified) recipe I found from Cut the Wheat

Ingredients:

3 Tbsp (that’s right people, TABLE SPOON) fresh ground flax seeds.
2 Tbsp Coconut Flour
3 eggs, separated
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp whole Flax seeds
1 Tbsp water

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F. and grease 4 wells of a donut pan
2. In a medium bowl, combine flax meal, coconut flour, salt, baking powder, and whole flax seeds. mix together.

3.   In a separate bowl, separate egg whites from the yolks, and beat both until fluffy. Add in 1 Tbsp water to the yolks before beating. Then combine the two and beat some more.
4. Fold eggs into flax mixture, set aside to thicken for 10 minutes, then pour batter into donut pan.

5. Bake bagels for approximately 15 minutes, or until golden and risen.

So this recipe came out fairly well. The bagels toasted well, and were able to hold a schmear. But I found the eggy taste of the bagels to be overwhelming (this is with already decreasing the original recipe by 1 whole egg!)

So I decided to try something else. If you can make a flax egg with just flax meal and some water, why do we need to use eggs at all? So here’s the second version of the flax bagel, with 4 simple ingredients (it’s really 2 ingredients if you don’t count water and salt! :D).

Just Flax Bagels

Ingredients:

1/4 cup of fresh ground Flax seeds
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 pinch of salt
5-8 Tbsp of water (add water till texture is like a very thick pancake batter)

Preparation:

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
2. Mix all ingredients in a medium bowl till the texture of very thick pancake batter. If you think your batter is a little too runny, just wait 5 minutes then stir it again. Remember that Flax seeds thicken quite a bit over time.
3. Scoop batter (I say scoop because it should be so thick that you should NOT be able to pour it) into 4 greased wells of a donut pan, and smooth over with the back of a spoon.
4. Bake for 20-25 min. Allow to cool, then gently loosen up the bagels from the wells.

See the difference in color from the “eggy” bagels? The only caveat is that the “just flax” bagels did not rise like the eggy bagels do. So when I initially took them out of the oven, I thought this was for sure a failed experiment. But when I took 2 halves, and put them together, voila! 1 complete, no-need-to-cut, extremely yummy bagel!

 The “Just Flax” bagels toasted even better than the original recipe. I gleefully ate mine with a nice fried egg in between. Piping hot. 🙂 And while nothing may ever surpass the yumminess of a real bagel, this was a pretty close, very satisfying, and totally healthy alternative.

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