2-Hour Homemade Bialys (Beginners Guide)

Learn how to make these chewy, airy homemade bialys with a soft-yet-sturdy crust and a classic onion, garlic, and poppy seed filling.

In this blog post I'll walk you through how to make a simple bialy dough with a step-by-step photo guide to shaping bialys. This is a quick and easy bialy recipe for beginners — you can do the whole process start to finish in just about 2 hours!

If you're new to making bialys, I do recommend reading or skimming through this whole post first, particularly the section on how to shape bialys. But if you want to jump straight to the recipe, click the JUMP TO RECIPE button above or the RECIPE button in the table of contents below.

My version of homemade bialy dough is a riff on my simple 3-hour plain bagel dough. I basically took out the sugar and added a touch more water to give the dough extra elasticity for stretching. It's a super easy dough to make using a mixer with a dough hook, but you can also knead it by hand.

While bialys are very similar to bagels, they also — and this is one of those things I feel like I'm probably not supposed to say as a trained pastry chef — have a lot in common with pizza.

Yes, really! Shaping homemade bialys is a lot like how I hand stretch pizza dough. I pre-shape dough into balls, then I flatten the center and stretch it out. Once baked, bialys have a similar chewy texture to pizza crust, albeit a bit denser; there aren't giant air bubbles in bialys.

Unlike shaping a pizza, when shaping bialys, I stop when the dough is about 5 inches wide so that when they bake, the center tightens around the filling rather than baking up flat.

Bialy Filling - Traditional bialy filling is made of onions, garlic, and poppy seeds and is very quick and easy to make. You'll need olive oil or butter, minced yellow onion, garlic powder or a minced clove of garlic, poppy seeds, and a pinch each of salt and pepper.

I also like to include a little bit of garlic powder in my bialy dough to help carry some of the garlic flavor from the filling through every bite, but optional if you'd rather leave it out.

Other bialy filling ideas: Substitute everything bagel seasoning instead of poppy seeds, add a couple crumbles of feta cheese or other shredded cheeses like gruyere or cheddar, or even add other savory additions like minced sun dried tomatoes, pepperoni, sesame seeds, scallions, or fresh herbs like thyme or rosemary.

Making My Easy Bialy Dough

Making the dough for homemade bialys is very straightforward. It follows the same process as my easy plain bagel dough, and I've got instructions for how to knead the dough by hand in that blog post if you don't have a mixer.

I start by mixing the dough with the dough hook until it comes together in a shaggy, messy ball. Then I knead it until it is smooth, soft, and elastic; it will cling just slightly to the bowl when you pause the mixer.

Once the dough has been kneaded, I shape it into a ball and let it rise until doubled in size.

I usually make the onion and poppy seed bialy filling during the dough's first rise, but you can also make it after dividing the dough into balls while they're rising for a second time.

I always want the filling to have a little time to cool before I use it, to lessen the risk of the onions burning in the oven.

How I Shape Bialys

Shaping homemade bialys happens in two stages. First, I divide and pre-shape the dough into eight equal balls of dough. This is also how I pre-shape a dough ball for making bagels, so head over to my bagel recipe post if you want more detail on how to do that.

Before stretching, I let them rest one more time.

The second stage of shaping bialys is creating the divot for the filling.

The dough will shrink back as it rests and will fill in as it bakes, so the center needs to be nice and flat before adding the filling.

Once I've done an initial stretch on each bialy, I like to give each one another quick stretch.

I usually bake my bialys just like this, but you can also brush or spritz the outsides of the bialys with water and sprinkle them with additional poppy seeds, sesame seeds, etc. It's up to you! If you do spritz the outsides with water to add seeds, they'll bake up a little darker in color than if you bake them without.

When you first take the bialys out of the oven, they will be hard and firm to the touch. Don't worry; they'll soften as they cool.

My Best Practical Tips and Recipe Notes

• Stretching a bialy is a lot like stretching pizza dough. Bialy dough is a lower hydration dough with a shorter resting period, so it's a little less stretchy than pizza dough. You can't rely quite so much on gravity to help stretch them, but it's a very similar process. Check out my guide to hand-stretching pizza dough for more tips and visuals!
• If you accidentally tear the center of any of your bialys, just pinch the dough back together. Let it rest for 1-2 minutes, then try stretching it again.
• For garlic powder and poppy seeds, I've been really liking Burlap & Barrel's Purple Stripe Garlic. It has a really nice, buttery, complex garlic flavor, perfect for garlic fiends like me.
• Serving homemade bialys: Personally, I enjoy eating bialys plain, still warm from the oven, or at least freshly toasted. But you can also eat them topped with cream cheese, smoked lox, butter, capers, etc. Some people do slice their bialys like bagels and put the filling in the middle, but I find I lose too much of the onion filling that way so if I add any toppings I usually put them on top or inside the divot in the middle.

📖 Recipe