Rosemary Olive Oil Bagels (Bruegger's Copycat)

These rosemary olive oil bagels are a near-perfect copycat for the ones you can get at Bruegger's Bagels. They're golden brown, chewy and tender, with nice herbal flavor from the olive oil and fresh minced rosemary.

My go-to bagel order for years when I lived in near a Bruegger's Bagels, was a rosemary olive oil bagel, toasted, with homemade cream cheese. Preferably scallion cream cheese if they had it (and oh, it was a tragedy when they don't). But honestly, any cream cheese would do.

This bagel dough would also be so good made into homemade cream cheese stuffed mini bagels too, btw!

So it was inevitable, I suppose, without a Bruegger's nearby, that I'd come up with a rosemary olive oil bagel recipe of my very own. So let's get into it!

Why this Recipe Works

When I first started making bagels many years ago, I tried making a "rosemary bagel" by putting minced fresh rosemary on top of my standard plain bagel recipe. I was sorely disappointed when the rosemary dried and shriveled unpleasantly in the oven.

It took me a few tries to get this copycat recipe for Breugger's rosemary olive oil bagels just right. If you use even a little too much oil, the bagels end up a little fluffier and lighter, more like an egg bagel.

I tried using an olive oil wash on the outside instead of an egg wash, but that just led to dusty, cracked bagel crusts. And if you're shy with the rosemary you might as well not use it at all.

The trick is to be heavy-handed with the fresh rosemary and use a lighter hand with the olive oil — but choose a high-quality olive oil with an assertive flavor. The end result is a chewy, dense bagel with lots of fresh, savory rosemary flavor which becomes quite fragrant when minced and infused in the olive oil.

What to serve on rosemary olive oil bagels

The funny thing about these bagels is that on their own, they're just not living up to their full potential.

As I was developing this recipe, I quickly realized that tasting the bagels on their own wasn't going to tell me when I had achieved a dupe of the Breugger's version.

Once I added cream cheese to my taste test, they truly began to shine. (Like my chewy homemade egg bagels, they're also great with egg or tuna salad and thinly sliced tomato and mayonnaise, fwiw.)

So yeah, plain rosemary olive oil bagels are... just fine. I feel this way about the Breugger's version, too. They're good. I like them. But pairing them with cream cheese is just *chefs kiss* perfection.

I knew I had nailed this recipe when the bagels on their own inspired a satisfied shrug, but the bagels with cream cheese sent me wooshing Ratatouille-style back to afternoons waiting for the bus in downtown Pittsburgh with my friends, bagels in hand.

Ingredient Notes

You don't need a lot of fancy ingredients to make rosemary olive oil bagels. It's basically your standard bagel ingredients plus some olive oil and rosemary!

• All-purpose or bread flour - Either one will work for these. Bread flour is more traditional for bagel making because it's better at gluten development and creates chewier bagels. But all-purpose works just fine too.
• Brown sugar - I like the extra flavor the brown sugar adds to these bagels, but if you're out of it, just sub in the same amount of plain white sugar.
• Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt - I test all my recipes with Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt which has a larger, airier crystal structure than other brands of salt. If using a different brand of salt, use half as much salt.
• Instant Yeast - Instant yeast can be added directly to your dry ingredients without blooming in water first. If you have active dry yeast, you can use it the same way, your dough might just be a little slower to rise (or will rise better somewhere warmer).
• Extra virgin olive oil - I use my fave California Olive Ranch Extra Virgin Olive Oil for these. It's affordable, accessible, I really like the flavor, and I know I can trust it to be the real deal (beware brands selling fake olive oil). You will taste the olive oil in these bagels, so pick a quality olive oil!
• Fresh rosemary sprigs - Use fresh rosemary sprigs. The dried stuff is brittle and hard and texturally unpleasant to eat in a bagel.
• Large egg - Whisked with a pinch of salt as an egg wash.

How to make rosemary olive oil bagel dough

The first step of making rosemary olive oil bagels is to make a rosemary infused olive oil.

This is exactly what it sounds like — a mixture of olive oil and minced rosemary. You can do this up to a day or two before making the bagels.

The longer the rosemary sits in the olive oil, the stronger the flavor will be and the softer the rosemary pieces will be.

While the rosemary infuses in the olive oil, mix your flour, sugar, and salt in the bowl of your mixer. Break up any lumps of brown sugar with your hands or a whisk.

Then add the instant yeast. Salt can kill yeast, so make sure the salt is mixed into the flour before adding yeast, or that the salt and yeast are in different parts of the bowl when you add the yeast.

Pour the lukewarm water into the center of the flour mixture along with the rosemary and olive oil infusion.

If you live somewhere very humid, hold back a few tablespoons of water and only add them if the dough needs it. If you live somewhere very dry, you may need to add a few extra teaspoons of water (but only do this if absolutely necessary!).

Mixing vs. Kneading:

• Mixing the dough is the step where you want all the ingredients to just come together. There shouldn't be any dry bits of flour in the bottom of the bowl and it should mostly be one messy looking lump on the dough hook. It can take a few minutes before the dough is completely mixed, and you can use this time to add more water or more flour if the dough needs it.
• Kneading is the step after mixing, where you're developing gluten in the dough. Gluten provides strength and structure and you'll see your messy, lumpy dough become smooth and fully hydrated by the end of the kneading process.

Once the dough is kneaded, you'll put it in a bowl or bucket coated with a bit of olive oil and let it rise for 1 hour or until doubled in size.

Dough rises faster in warm environments (ideally 72-75F), so if you live somewhere cold you'll want to put it somewhere warm, like your OFF oven with the oven light on. If you live somewhere very warm, just check on it a bit earlier than one hour — it might be ready sooner than an hour!

If "doubled in size" is a hard target for you, please know it's just a rough way of explaining what to look for before moving on to the next step. Another way to tell if your dough has finished proofing (that's baker for "rising") is to press a lightly floured fingertip into the dough. The indent should fill back in a little, but not completely. If the indent fills in immediately, you can let it rise a little bit longer. But if you press in and the dough deflates quickly, it has over-proofed. If this happens, give the dough a quick knead on the counter and then let it rest for 10 minutes. It will be okay.

How to Shape Bagels

I used my trusty plain bagel recipe as the base for these, so they come together quickly and are very easy to shape.

And this rosemary olive oil dough is super fun to work with, btw. I love bagel dough in general because it's so low hydration that it doesn't stick to me/the counter/everything. The addition of olive oil makes it even more silky smooth and elastic than its plain bagel cousins, and it's just a lot of fun to make these, okay? Having fun is important!

This is the same tutorial from my recipe for plain bagels. The shaping is exactly the same, only the olive oil dough is slightly more elastic. You'll probably want to stretch the holes out again right before you boil them or they'll close up in the oven.

Divide the dough into equal portions on an unfloured surface. If you're combining a few pieces together to make a portion, stack the smaller pieces on top of the bigger pieces. Tuck the edges up so the dough is smooth against the counter with a seam pinched together on top. Repeat until the dough ball feels fairly tight. Don't tear the dough, just stretch it.

Then, flip the dough over so the seam side is down against the counter. Cup your hand around the dough and slide it toward you. The dough will take on an oval shape. Rotate it 90 degrees and repeat to turn the oval into a round circle.

(Or, cup your hand around the dough with your pinkie-side flush against an unfloured counter and your thumb and forefinger making an O- or C-like shape above the dough. Move your hand in quick circles without picking your pinkie off the counter, and the dough will quickly shape itself into a nice smooth ball of dough.)

Once the dough has been shaped into balls, coat your hands in flour and stick a thumb through the bottom seam of the dough. Slide your other thumb in and gently squeeze and stretch, rotating the dough through your hands until the bagel hole is at least the same width as the sides of the bagel if not bigger.

You may want to repeat the stretching process again before boiling to keep the hole from closing up in the oven.

Once the bagels are shaped, you'll boil them for about a minute per side. Boiling gelatinizes the starches in the crust and gives you that classic shiny, smooth, chewy bagel exterior. If you skip this step you'll end up with bagel shaped bread. It might look like a bagel, but it will be missing that thing that makes bagels uniquely... bagely.

Once they've been boiled, all they need is a quick egg wash to make them shiny and golden brown. Then you bake them!

Practical Tips and Recipe Notes

• If you want to intensify the flavors you can let the shaped bagels (before boiling) sit overnight (8-10 hours) in the fridge. This gives the rosemary more time to infuse in the dough, and slows the bagels' rise.
• A totally optional step for getting a nice crunchy bagel bottom is to lightly sprinkle your parchment paper or silicone mat with cornmeal or semolina flour before putting the boiled bagels down on them.
• I know I talked a lot about cream cheese above, but I usually make my own creamy goat cheese and use that instead.
• Bagel dough is a low hydration dough. Resist adding any more liquid to it than you need to. If you live somewhere very dry, you may need to add just a touch extra. If so, add about 1 teaspoon of olive oil and let the mixer run another 20-30 seconds before adding more, 1 teaspoon at a time. If the dough is very sticky that's a sign you added too much liquid; dust in more flour until it pulls away from the sides of the bowl.

📖 Recipe

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This post was originally published on 7/27/2020. Last updated 8/4/2021.