Truthfully, my early years in suburban Kentucky included more Bagel Bites than authentic pizza or bagels. Therefore, while it was with great fear that I attempted to make bagels at home, I have the home-court advantage with Bagel Bites: pizza in the morning, pizza on the weekends, and pizza for dinner!
Okay, sure. However, it’s probably criminal in pizza and bagels only in specific areas. For those raised on English muffins and pizza, Bagel Bites are an obvious extension of the entire cheesy kind of processed breakfast food that is transformed into tasty snacks.
As a result of assembly, the English muffin is, at the very least, homemade, and Bagel Bites have strictly been commercialized due to the shortage of mini bagels. With all due gratitude to people who favor big pizza bagels, the main attraction of a Bagel Bite lies in its cute, chibi-sized chubbiness.
Mini Bagels That Stay Tender
You can now reduce any bagel recipe to a smaller size. However, time is the key. If you don’t bake your small bagels as soon as possible, the bagels will become dry within several hours. Toasting them can bring them back to some extent, making them crisp but ruining their great chew.
It’s a relief to know that I’ve cracked the recipe for bagels that remain fresh for a couple of days, making the idea to DIY Bagel Bites easy to accomplish because the bagels will last up to a day or two in a bag made of paper.
The dough is made precisely the same way; however, it is then separated into smaller portions before boiling and baking. The technique is to bake mini bagels on wire racks covered with parchment (to avoid sticking) and place them into half-sheet pans (for convenience).
This arrangement slows heat transfer to the center, keeping the bagels moist. It also prevents their bottoms from becoming crisp.
This results in a tiny small bagel with a crisp, blistered crust that’s soft and chewy at the bottom. This means that when baked to melt the cheese, they’ll crisp without becoming too hard or crunchy. (Baking on an aluminum rack effectively keeps large-sized bagels soft at the bottom, especially in case you want to cut the bagels for sandwiches.)
Once the baking is completed, you now have the time of 48 hours to finish the task. This makes it simple to spread out my efforts over a couple of weeks, making bagels one day, one day, the following day after making the sauce, and assembling your Bagel Bites at my leisure. If you’d instead have a long day of Baking Bagel Bite, there’s no reason stopping you from churning everything out in one sitting.
Topping and Baking
, When you have the bagel component done, I donunnecessaryrk out the pizza portion of the equation. However, there are some essential tips to be aware of. First, lightly toast the mini bagels to stop them from taking in the red sauce. They’ll remain chewy and crisp rather than becoming spongy. The toasting shouldn’t be so intense that they get brown or challenging and then enough to dry the cut surface and create the barrier.
In addition, you’ll need the sauce to be simple but powerful because the subtle flavors that shine on delicate pasta will disappear under the gummy bagel. I highly recommend Daniel’s recipe for Italian-American red sauce because it’s fast and easy to make, with a typical tomato flavor. In addition, at around 5 cups of sauce, the yield is perfect for topping 32 mini-bagels with a couple of tablespoons of dressing.
The mini bagels should be topped with a massive amount of cheese, about 1/3 of an ounce (not that you need to weigh it). I like finely chopped mozzarella since it’s so light it takes longer to melt, which gives the bagels enough chance to get warm and crisp on the bottom. Additionally, the shredded pieces that fall out transform into crunchy, crispy, toasty pieces placed around the edges of a sandwich made with grilled cheese.
Although you can find a variety of types of Bagel Bites out in nature, the most delicious kind is served with sliced pepperoni. The tiny cubes ensure you’ll get just a tiny of it in each bite, as well as helping the pepperoni cook faster. The most important thing is that dicing will give the user Bagel Bites that look just as accurate.
In just 20 minutes, in an oven that is hot and you’ll have the perfect snack that any child in the 80s could resist: crisp and cheesy, deliciously chewy, and everything I’ve ever wanted from the form of a tiny, sloppy canape. It’s not like I need to wait until a meal, or the Super Bowl party, to have them. With pizza on a bagel, you can take pizza anytime.