Hand-Rolled New York-Style Bagels (Overnight Recipe)

These homemade hand rolled bagels are a great way to take your bagel making skills to the next level. Using traditional New York-style bagel ingredients like bread flour and barley malt syrup makes for chewy bagels that are perfectly dense, with a hint of sweetness and a shiny, blistered crust. Oh yes, we're going all-in on that classic New York-style bagel taste!

Don't worry if you're not a morning person – these overnight bagels are still all about convenience. You can prep the dough the night before so all that's left to do in the morning is a quick boil and bake, and you'll have a batch of shiny, fresh hand rolled bagels ready to shmear with some easy homemade cream cheese.

Unlike my other popular easy bagel recipes, which can be made in about 2 hours with no speciality ingredients needed and are shaped by poking a hole through a ball of dough, this is a rope-rolled New York-style bagel recipe, made using more traditional ingredients and shaping methods.

If you're a beginner, don't worry. I've written this bagel recipe with plenty of detail and step-by-step visuals so that anyone can follow it — including instructions for how to knead the dough by hand if you don't have a mixer. If you're looking for a great beginner's guide to hand-rolled bagels, you're in the right place.

About This Bagel Recipe

Bagels are my favorite thing to bake in the whole world. And while I usually use my tried-and-true easy plain bagel recipe, I've also tried other more "traditional" hand-rolled bagel recipes over the years. I'm a trained pastry chef; surely I should be able to make a traditional hand-rolled bagel, right?

But recipe after recipe, I ran into issues. The dough was too dry for the bagel rope to stay stuck together, or the bagels were smaller and thinner than I wanted, or the shaping instructions just didn't make sense to my ADHD brain.

So I decided to take my existing easy bagel recipe and use that as a starting point instead.

While there will always be a special place in my heart for my quick bagel recipes, and those are the bagels I make most often, these hand-rolled overnight bagels are undeniably a better bagel. They have a blistered, crisp crust and a chewy center and are much closer to what I picture when I think of a New York-style bagel.

While this bagel recipe is a "more traditional" New York-style version of my quick and easy bagel recipe, there are certainly other bagel recipes that draw on other bagel traditions or that are "more traditional" than mine.

For example, some bagels are traditionally baked on bagel boards (burlap-wrapped wood planks that are soaked in water) prior to baking on a baking steel. I didn't do that for this recipe, though you absolutely could.

"Traditional" is relative, anyway. In Chicago, bagels are steamed rather than boiled. In Montreal, bagels are sweeter and flavored with honey. In Poland, you'll find obwarzanki krakowski, a twisted cousin of the bagel that is coated with seeds.

Most New York-style bagel recipes are kneaded by hand rather than using a mixer. This is partially because bagel dough is a tough, dense, low-hydration dough that can strain your mixer's motor, and partially because it's easier to get a feel for the dough consistency when you knead by hand.

I designed this recipe to work with a stand mixer with dough hook, though I did include instructions for kneading by hand as well. Using a mixer makes everything easier, faster, and cleaner. Just because kneading by hand is traditional...well, some traditions don't have to be carried on, you know? I

This is a Low Hydration Dough

In baking, hydration is the amount of water in a dough relative to the total amount of flour, expressed as a percentage. (So a recipe with 100 grams of flour and 75 grams of water is a 75% hydration dough.)

Bagels traditionally use a low-hydration dough, ranging from 55% to 65% hydration (according to King Arthur Baking).

My quick plain bagel recipe, which uses all-purpose flour, has a hydration of 60%. For this more traditional bagel dough, I dropped the hydration just two percent, to 58% hydration. The high-gluten (high-protein) bread flour I use in this recipe is more absorbent than all-purpose flour, but still provides plenty of chewiness with the reduced amount of water.

Low hydration doughs are stiffer, denser, and tougher to knead. So I included two 10-minute resting periods that give the dough and the mixer a chance to rest and relax so that you can make it in a stand mixer with a dough hook without burning out your motor.

Ingredient Notes

Here are the ingredients you'll need to make these New York-style hand rolled bagels! This recipe is all about the specifics, so I really don't recommend making any substitutions here (other than the yeast or salt as indicated). See recipe card for quantities.

Bread Flour - I use King Arthur Baking Company's bread flour (aka high gluten/high protein flour), which has a higher protein content than other brands of bread flour to make these bagels. Bread flour is traditionally used to develop bagels' characteristic chewy crust and texture. It excels at developing a nice elasticity for shaping, too.

Barley Malt Syrup - This thick, sticky syrup provides a moderate amount of sweetness in traditional bagel recipes. I use it in the dough as well as in the water bath the bagels are boiled in. It is crucial for giving bagels their bagel-y flavor and golden brown coloring. You can buy barley malt syrup at some grocery stores, but it's not the easiest to find. I finally found it at my local Whole Foods, but you can also buy barley malt syrup online.

Semolina Flour - (Not pictured) I use semolina flour to dust the sheet pan under the bagels. Some people use cornmeal, but I prefer the finer texture of semolina flour.

Toppings - These bagels are great plain, but you can also top them with my homemade everything bagel seasoning, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, dried onion, cinnamon sugar, or any of your favorite bagel toppings.

Instructions

The first step is to dissolve the barley malt syrup and salt in warm water (95°F). The bagels are going to rise mostly in the fridge, so I wanted to give the yeast a nice warm environment to get working before the fridge slows them down.

Mix the dough until a cohesive-yet-messy dough forms. After a short rest, knead the dough on low speed again, dusting in flour as needed, until it is smooth and soft. It should feel slightly tacky, not sticky.

🥯 How to Hand Roll Bagels

Hand rolling bagels by forming a rope and joining the ends (as opposed to rolling a ball of dough and poking a hole through the middle) is the traditional method of bagel shaping when it comes to New York-style bagels.

Rolling the dough this way collapses the gluten structure inside the dough, producing a denser, tighter, chewier crumb.

To make hand-rolled bagels, start by dividing the dough into six equal portions. Then, pre-shape each piece of dough into a log. This helps the dough get used to the rope-like shape needed to form the bagels.

If you need to combine a few pieces together to make one portion of dough, stack the smaller pieces on top of the bigger pieces so they get tucked inside. Flatten the dough against the counter to make a vaguely rectangular shape with the long side facing you.

Set the pre-shaped bagel dough logs aside under a damp (not wet) paper towel. Work quickly; bagel dough rises fast and if you let the ropes hang out too long, they'll start developing air bubbles inside, which you don't want.

I always arrange the pre-shaped logs in the order I pre-shaped them so I can do the next steps in the same order. This will keep any piece of dough from sitting for too long before being shaped.

The overlapping ends should take up almost the full width of your palm. You want plenty of overlap when you roll it against the counter, so the bagel doesn't get too thin where it's sealed shut.

Not overlapping the ends of the rope enough was one of the biggest mistakes I made when I was first learning how to join the ends of the bagel dough. Give yourself lots of overlap!

This pinching technique may not be necessary — it's certainly not part of a traditional New York-style bagel shaping technique. But I've found it works well for me, especially if I can feel the dough rope getting thinner than I'd like before the two ends have fully sealed together.

Once you go around and pinch those seams, you can give the bagel another quick roll on the counter to smooth them out.

These Bagels Need A Long, Cold Rise Time

Arrange the shaped bagels on a sheet tray sprinkled with semolina flour. The semolina gives the bagels a lightly textured bottom when you bake them and helps prevent them from sticking to the pan as they rise.

New York-style bagels use a long cold rise in the fridge to slow down the yeast activity and give the bagel dough plenty of time to rest, relax, and seal together where you've joined the two ends of the rope. It also helps develop that amazing bagel flavor.

"The combination of high protein flour and plenty of sweetener makes [bagels] expand really fast. Incredibly fast. Before-your-eyes fast. Note that doubling in size might make them seem ready for the oven, but their flavor will be flat unless given enough time to rise."

Cathy Barrow, Bagels, Schmears, and a Nice Piece of Fish

If you rush the cold proofing step or try to do it faster at room temperature, you'll end up with airy, overproofed bagels that lack flavor and come undone when you boil and bake them.

Because the fridge slows down the rise time, you have a pretty big window of time in which to boil and bake them — anywhere from 8-12 hours is usually the perfectly proofed window for me.

Boiling, Topping, and Baking Bagels

Boiling is a crucial step in the bagel-making process. The hot water kickstarts yeast activity, allowing the bagels to begin expanding while also gelatinizing the starches in the crust. Adding barley malt syrup to the water bath gives the bagel crust a hint of sweetness and helps with browning, too.

After the bagels have been boiled, arrange them back on the lined sheet pan sprinkled with more semolina flour.

📖 Recipe