They LIE!.
As I posted a few days ago, I finally achieved the essence of bagelocity; that chewy, stick-to-your-teeth quality of a good bagel and the degree to which it is present in my further pursuits is now under my control. Under no circumstances am I going to give up the ship and reveal the answer in the back of the book. If I handed it to you then you would make no progress as a baker and I certainly wouldn't respect you any more. But to come to the techniques yourself? That becomes a different story.
I will not, however, contribute to the massive disinformation on the subject.
I've been baking bread for close to 2 years now. In that time I have come a greater distance than I'd planned or perhaps even intended. Yet, as is true in all worthwhile endeavors, the more I know the more I don't know. So the choice to get the baking of bagels "down" was sourced strictly in naive arrogance.
When I pick a foodstuff to hone my skills on I follow a fairly straightforward procedure. Collect several recipes (or several dozen), distill them down to a few variations (they rarely differ in any meaningful manner), try a few then tweak away. Throughout the process I keep notes on what worked, what didn't, etc.
For most breads this worked fine. I was able to narrow in on what I was looking for by interpolating the strangely abstract descriptions of how dough should feel, what may or may not be happening at certain points in the process, the types of flour, etc. Most of the sources provide some meaningful insight (if usually by negative space) and send me along the path to my ever progressing goals.
HOWEVER. This is not universally true.
Until a week ago, if you asked me about recipes on line I would have launched into a tirade worse than any political rant (no matter how well or ill informed) I've embarked on in several years. Recipes online and in a great many "well respected works on baking" LIE. I find it as inexcusable as it is incomprehensible. But one thing it is, is true.
I have multiple oven thermometers. I measure ingredients by weight, not volume (essential!) I take notes on my successes and failures and repeat experiments until I get reproducible results. Then I will change one variable at a time (insofar as my neophyte skills allow me to) and remeasure. So I can say, with some measure of certainty that if you follow the recipes you find you will end up with, at best, little doughnut shaped pieces of bread.
They will most likely be perfectly edible. But you won't have bagels. Not until you do your homework.
Doing your homework in baking means burying yourself in books on gluten development, the differences between grades of flour, kneading, proofing and fermentation, preferments, and enough other aspects on the art and chemistry of baking as to make you quite mad.
And it means failing. Failing over and over again, commiting to the fact that until you get it right, most of your results will end up as breadcrumbs or pigeon food. There is no "waste" when you've got another factlet to put in your notebook. Those failures are successes.
Because you can't learn how to knead out of a book any more than you know how dough smells or behaves when it's "just right" for what you're making. It's a fundamentally experiential learning process.
Because the answers aren't magic. Well... not in that sense anyway. It's there to be discovered by people who are willing to do their homework.
I'm not a master baker. I'm not even a particularly good baker. I can't make a baguette to save my life. I have virtually no control over the quality of the crust in most of my work and more often than not I resort to cheap tricks to make people's eyes roll back in their head upon eating the fruits of my labors (i.e. cheesebread.)
So what's my damn point? Yeah, fair question. I suppose I've got a couple:
As Bjarne Stroustrup says: "Don't believe in magic". People will tell you that there's a mystical secret to baking bagels (or to anything.) They're almost always trying to cover for the fact that they have no idea how to do it.
The solution is out there. It doesn't take much more than patience and perseverance.
Reinvent the wheel. It's worth it.
[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]
There is so much in here about KM and I didn't realise it until I had read it twice.
Mike describes the process of learning how to bake: Taking notes. The failed experiments. Perseverence. Collecting from sources. Weighing & distilling the information. Revelations. Progress. Results.
He has probably accumulated a vast amount of knowledge about baking in general and baking bakels in this instance. And he won't share it :)
Resident Evil 4
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80%
Morrowind
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15%
GTA San Andreas
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5%