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Whether it’s tailgating or homegating, fans of the Buffalo Bills are known to be elite tier when it comes to food. Wingin’ It returns for it’s eighth season of Mad Hatter-esque recipes taking inspiration from the Buffalo Bills and their opponents.
First and foremost thank you again to **FLBillsFan451** for coming through with a good idea and sticking with the series. I was sent a list of possible ideas from **FLBillsFan451** that were Atlanta-themed and one stood out. I liked the idea of rainbow bagels, which are apparently a thing in Atlanta and I loved the presentation. Then my hubris kicked in.
It would have been very easy to make a simple pattern to integrate Bills colors into bagel dough, but let me tell you a secret. If I ask a family member to taste something and they say “good” I’m disappointed. Bills bagels would have been good. I wanted a picture perfect Zubaz bagel. And I \*\*\*\*ing got one! I presented the idea to Buffalo Rumblings Editor in Chief Matt Byham who indicated he’d seen similar in the wild. I looked it up, confirmed what he had seen and then my hubris went into overdrive.
I won’t share what I found looking for Bills bagels but what I saw reinforced my plan of action. This would be a boom or bust proposition to forever alter the fabric of bagel reality. Ladies and gentleman, I am your new Bagel Overlord!
Arrogance aside, I have one more shout out. Thank you to [Sally’s Baking](https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/homemade-bagels/) for an incredibly informative bagel tutorial to help me on this journey.
Makes: About 8Active Time: Two hours
Total Time: Four hours
1 1/2 cups warm water (see tips below)1 Tbsp honey1 packet dry yeast4 1/4 cups bread flour1 Tbsp salt2 tsp garlic powderolive oilFood coloring1 large egg or 2 egg whites1 Tbsp waterGround red pepper and garlic powder for sprinkling
Shredded cheddar cheese
2 pints of water
1/4 cup honey
1. **Stir** together warm water and honey in glass or ceramic mixing bowl.
2. **Sprinkle** yeast packet over the entire water surface and let it proof (about five minutes, until it looks foamy).
3. **While yeast is proofing**; add flour, salt, and garlic powder to stand mixer on low.
4. **After yeast has proofed**, slowly add to mixer. Allow ingredients to combine until well blended and dough starts to pull from sides and form a single ball.
5. **Knead** dough on medium mixer setting for another 5 min or so.
6. While dough is kneading, **oil** three mixing bowls.
7. After kneading is done, **separate** dough into equal portions into the three bowls.
8. Return one ball to the mixer and **add** red food coloring (see below) and **mix** until evenly colored. Move colored dough back to its mixing bowl.
9. **Clean** and dry mixer.
10. **Add** second ball of uncolored dough to mixer and add blue food coloring. Mix until evenly colored and return dough to bowl.
11. **Cover** all three bowls with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for about one hour or until dough has doubled in size (remember this means volume not height).
12. **Preheat** oven to 400º and lightly oil baking sheets.
13. **Add** two pints of water and honey to sauté pan and boil.
14. **Separate** each ball of dough into eight little balls on parchment paper.
15. Take one ball of each color and **layer** as shown below.
16. **Squeeze** dough firmly and roll into ball shape.
17. **Press** flat on parchment paper and stretch middle until hole forms. Aim for a one-inch to two-inch hole in the middle.
18. **Boil** bagels for one minute, flip then boil for another minute and transfer to oiled cooking sheet.
19. **Combine** egg or egg whites with water to make egg wash.
20. **Brush** the top of each bagel lightly with egg wash.
21. **Bake** for about 15 min.
22. **Remove** from oven, repeat egg wash and add red pepper, garlic powder, and cheese.
23. **Return** to oven making sure to rotate pans from original position and bake until golden, about 15 more min.
24. **Question** the nature of existence and why you ever thought this was a good idea to begin with.
25. Let the bagels **cool** completely before serving.
26. Cut in half and have **faith** restored in the universe.
This recipe has a lot of steps, because you need to be deliberate. I’m going to try to rapid-fire the tips so you can stop reading this before the game starts.
* If you looked at the recipe I linked as being a big contributor to this you’ll see I used more flour right out of the gate. You want the dough to be soft but not sticky, and not crumbly. You might need to work on the balance a bit but I recommend a little more flour to start because of the food color addition. Speaking of…
* How ever much coloring you think you need, make sure you have a lot more than that. It takes a LOT to make deep colors in this dough.
* If you don’t have a stand mixer… Ha, ha, ha! Good luck! I tried mixing the red in the mixer while doing the blue by hand and guess which thing I’m never attempting again.
* Go easy on the egg wash or it might drip down and create a burnt bottom. I may have done that for a few.
* I struggled on how to get even amounts of color with the bagels if we were making eight of them and the best solution I had was to separate into eight balls each like show.
* I stacked the layers vertically as seen in the second picture. Yes it will look like a lump of colorful poo.
* For orienting the stripe pattern though that stack of poo slices gets turned sideways then formed into a ball as seen in picture three.
* Picture four are my three best bagels after the boiling process is done.
* The next is the same three after full baking. Now you know why I didn’t use the top of an unsliced bagel as my main image. They taste good and aren’t bad looking for bagels but they’re not beautiful until they’re cut.
* If you follow my instructions well, the next picture shows the results you can expect. Layering the colors in this order: Red, white, red, blue, repeat will give you the right pattern and wide stripes like this. Since red is every other layer, you need to make those thinner layers.
* How the hell did I get the thin stripes? I mean, the wide stripes are great, but the thin stripes (picture 7 shows a cross section) are next level. For the first time in Wingin’ It history…
I’m not telling. It’s not necessarily a wild secret to keep nor a complicated one. Instead of telling you how to replicate my process, I want to give one last tip that I learned along the way which the final pictures show. I was not remotely confident in these turning out even OK, let alone as great as I think they did. So I made a couple designs I thought were “safe” that would still scream Bills but be less likely to fail.
It turns out I had it backwards. The second to last picture shows my “safe” design of just mashing the three colors together for a simple red, white, blue look. That \*\*\*\*ed up shape is because bagel dough does NOT like sticking to itself once split. Like, at all. The last picture is me after fully cooking and toasting a bagel still able to separate fairly easy by color. So my final tip is this…
Whatever technique you use for mixing the colors, there’s no need to be delicate. Bagels need tough love. I realized that and for my final bagel I went for it. I used everything I learned from Sally and other recipes I looked at, the lessons I was learning live about the dough, and something from what might be an unexpected source and came away with one single, beautiful, perfect…
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