Bagels

I know that making your own bagels seems like a fairly abstruse practice. I include a recipe partly because most of the bagels for sale here are not bagels at all, but bread rolls with a hole in the middle – real bagels should be chewy, not remotely airy, with a tightly woven crumb – but also because they’re a pleasure to make. They belong here, and not in the children’s chapter, though children really enjoy making them, or rather forming them. I do too.

The cooking isn’t hard – tho