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.

Jump to:

• About This Recipe: What is a Bialy?
• Ingredient Notes
• Making Bialy Dough
• Making Bialy Filling
• How to Shape Bialys
• Storage Notes
• Practical Tips and Recipe Notes
• Recipe FAQ
• 📖 Recipe
• 💬 Comments

About This Recipe: What is a Bialy?

Bialys are a cousin of the bagel and, like the bagel, originated in Jewish communities in Poland. In the case of Bialys, they came specifically from Bialystock, Poland (you can guess how they got their name). Like bagels, bialys came over to America with Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s and became particularly popular in New York City.

Also like the bagel, bialys are made from a low-hydration dough. They're round with an indentation in the center, though unlike bagels, the hole in the middle of a bialy does not go all the way through. Bagels are boiled and have a shiny, hard crust with a dense, chewy texture. Bialys aren't boiled and have a softer crust with a lighter, chewy texture.

This homemade bialy dough is a riff on my simple 3-hour plain bagel dough. It's almost exactly the same, only I took out the sugar and added a touch more water to give the dough extra elasticity for stretching. It's super easy to make using a mixer with a dough hook or kneading 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 you hand stretch a pizza. The dough is pre-shaped into balls, then you flatten the center and stretch it until it's thin and almost translucent.

Once baked, bialys have a chewy texture that I love in a pizza crust, albeit a bit denser; you won't get giant air bubbles in bialys. Unlike shaping a pizza, when shaping bialys you stop when the dough is about 5 inches wide, and when they bake, the center tightens around the filling rather than baking up flat.

Ingredient Notes

Here are the ingredients that you'll need to make these easy homemade bialys! Please refer to the recipe card (at the end of the post) for specific quantities.

• All-Purpose Flour - Bialys, like bagels, are traditionally made with a higher protein/higher gluten bread flour which gives them that chewy texture, but I prefer using an all-purpose flour with a higher protein content (11.7%, closer to bread flour). Depending on what brand of flour you use, you may have better results using a bread flour.
• Instant Yeast - Sometimes called "rapid rise" or "quick rise" yeast. This yeast does not need to be bloomed in water and can be added directly to the dry ingredients.
• Salt - I use Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt which is half as salty as other brands of salt by volume. If measuring salt by weight, you can use any type or brand of salt. But if you're measuring by volume (teaspoons) and using a different brand of salt, even a different brand of kosher salt, cut the amount of salt in half.
• Garlic Powder - I 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 it's not 100% necessary if you'd rather leave it out.
• Water - Lukewarm to the touch. Not hot. If you want to be precise, it should be between 90-95°F.
• Bialy Filling - Traditional bialy filling is made of onions 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.

Other bialy filling ideas: When it comes to bialy filling, less is more. But if you want to dress up the filling you can 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 Bialy Dough

Making the dough for homemade bialys is very straightforward. You're following the same process as my easy plain bagel dough, minus the sugar plus a bit of garlic powder, so if you want more details or troubleshooting tips head over to that recipe! And if you don't have a mixer, check out my instructions for kneading bagel dough by hand.

For everyone else using a stand mixer, start by whisking the dry ingredients together in the bowl of your mixer. Make a well in the center and pour in the warm water.

Shape the dough into a smooth ball by tucking all the ends under. Place in a mixing bowl, cover, and let rise somewhere warm for about an hour. The dough should double in size easily and look quite airy.

Making Bialy Filling

You can either make this onion and poppy seed bialy filling while the dough rises the first time or after dividing the dough into balls and letting it rise for the second time.

Either way, you want the filling to cool before you use it, to lessen the risk of the onions burning in the oven.

How to Shape Bialys

Dust the pre-shaped balls of dough well with flour, cover with a clean kitchen towel, and let them rest for 30 minutes. This allows the gluten in the dough time to relax so that they're easier to stretch.

After 30 minutes, you'll notice the dough balls looking and feeling much airier. They may not double in size, but they'll be noticeably larger. If your kitchen is quite cold, they may need an extra 10-15 minutes.

The second stage of shaping bialys is creating the divot for the filling. I like to flip them over so I can press my thumbs on the seam side, sealing any wrinkles or loose edges as I stretch the dough.

TIP: If at any point the bialy dough is fighting you, feels like it's tearing, or doesn't want to stretch, place it back down and let it rest for a few minutes. This will let the gluten relax so you can you can resume stretching.

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 you add the filling.

Once you've done an initial stretch on each bialy, give each one another quick stretch now that the gluten has relaxed into this new stretched-out shape.

Add the filling, about 1-2 teaspoons per bialy, gently pressing the onion mixture flat into the center and up the sides of each divot.

You can bake your bialys just like this, or you can 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 doing that.

Bake the homemade bialys for 20 minutes at 450°F, then remove to a rack to cool. 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.

Storage Notes

Homemade bialys are best eaten while they're fresh — within 8-12 hours of baking. You can store them in the fridge for 24-48 hours, but you'll want to toast them before eating as the fridge temperature dries out the dough.

If you aren't going to eat them within a day or two, I recommend freezing them as soon as possible. You don't want to let the onion filling sit out at room temperature too long, and if you refrigerate them, the bread will go stale faster. Bialys are super easy to reheat from frozen. Just pop the frozen bialy in a preheated 350°F oven for 5-10 minutes!

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 do accidentally tear the center of any of your bialys, just pinch the dough back together. Let it rest for 1-2 minutes, then you can 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. They also sell these gorgeous Blue Poppy Seeds if you can't find them in your local grocery store. Use my exclusive discount code TPKPEPPERCORNS at checkout for a free Robusta Peppercorn Grinder with purchases $15+ (add the grinder to your cart and it will become free once you use the code!).
• 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 loose 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.

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