The Best Asiago Bagel Recipe (2024)

Watch my best asiago bagel recipe web story here.

Reader Rave

Panera Bagels

I worked at Panera during culinary school. Their bagels are huge. Huge!

Maybe softer than a New York bagel, but size counts.

The most popular bagels we sold–by a long shot–were asiago bagels.

Shredded cheese in the dough.Shredded cheese baked to golden perfection on top of each bagel.

Sometimes we’d pull them off the trays and little shelves of cheese would jut out from the bottom.Those were real winners, those cheese shelf bagels.

So, as an ode to my time working at Panera Bread, I give you Panera Copycat Asiago Cheese Bagels.

Credit Where Credit is Due

Since I had never made bagels before, I wanted to stick with a trusted recipe.

I generally like to find a few inspiration recipes and then do my own thing, using the recipes as a jumping off point.

This time, I stuck pretty close to the script. And the script was asiago bagels from Brown Eyed Baker.

Michelle’s recipe is based on a Peter Reinhart recipe, and as far as I’m concerned, bread doesn’t get too much more legit than that. (I know–I have and adore his Perfect Pan Pizza cookbook.)

He even assisted her in adapting his basic recipe to an asiago version via email.And that’s more than enough for me. He literally wrote the how-to of bagels.

So Why Make This Recipe?

The answer to that is in the changes I made to the original recipe:

• I diced the cheese for mixing in the dough in about 3/16″-1/4″ dice rather than shredding it. I wanted wee pockets of melty-cheesy goodness. It was more of a pain to incorporate the wee cubes of cheese into the stiff dough, but I think it was worth it. The flavor will be the same if you shred it though, so do what you feel led to do.
• Shaping: I give two ways to shape the bagels. The traditional method of making a rope of dough yields much chewier bagels, and that’s the method I recommend.

In the dough, diced cheese is better than shredded cheese, although you’ll want shredded cheese to top your bagels with.

If you already know you want to make this recipe, you can jump straight to it. And when you do make it, I have a favor to ask:

Ingredients

The ingredients for this asiago bagel recipe are surprisingly straightforward. The trick is, you use several ingredients more than once and in different ways.

Still, the list is short:

The Sponge

Making a sponge is easy, I promise.

All you do is mix flour, water, and yeast together to make a thick batter and then let it rise for a few hours.

This gives the flour a chance to start being converted into sugars by the yeast and allows the yeast to eat and happily multiply before being weighed down by extra flour.

The Dough

To make the dough, you use all the sponge you made plus additional flour, a touch of yeast for added oomph, malt syrup (or honey or dark corn syrup), and kosher salt.

The salt adds flavor and moderates the yeast production to keep that dense/chewy bagel texture we love.

And of course, you then knead in the cheese.

The Boil

Aside from bringing a big old pot of water to a boil, add some malt syrup (or honey or dark corn sryup) to the water.

The point of boiling the bagels is to gelatinize the outside of them to keep them from rising more than just a little bit.

This keeps the crumb nice and tight and the texture chewy.

Adding a touch of malt syrup adds the merest bit of sweetness and shine to the crackly bagel crust.

Mixing the Dough

Making the dough is a pretty straightforward process, although there are multiple steps.

Please, if you are going to make these, I cannot stress enough that you really need to use a heavy-duty stand mixer for this job unless you are used to kneading pretty heavy dough.

The dough is stiff and your mixer will definitely get a workout!

• mix sponge ingredients together
• allow to rise until very light and bubbly
• mix in additional flour and yeast plus salt and malt syrup
• knead the dough until smooth and supple
• knead in the cheese by hand
• scale out the dough and let it rest

How to Shape Bagels

There are two main ways to shape your bagels. Each method starts the same way:

Scale out your dough into bagel-sized portions (most bagel recipes scaled for home baking make 12, so divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. I weigh the entire amount of dough and then divide by 12, scaling each piece accordingly.

Once you scale your dough, you roll the dough into rounds.

After that, you have two choices:

• either poke a hole in the center of each round, stretching it out well so it doesn’t close up while baking or
• roll each piece of dough into a rope, overlap the two ends and roll them together to make a ring.

PRO TIP: Since poking a hole in the center effectively shortens the gluten strands, rolling the dough into a rope will yield a chewier bagel. Either way will work, but I prefer the traditional method for the chewiest bagels.

The Traditional Way

There are a few steps to shaping bagels traditionally, but they’re not hard. Here’s how it goes, by the number:

1. Flatten each round of dough down, pressing out as much of the gas as you can.
2. Fold opposite side of your flattened round in by about an inch, like how you’d start a burrito or an egg roll.
3. Tightly roll up the (now) strip of dough.
4. Place seam side down.

Perform all of those steps in a row for each piece of dough. Once you’ve shaped them, place them back on your pan-sprayed sheet pan to rest. This will make them easier to roll out in step 5.

Once all 12 pieces of dough are shaped, take each one, and one by one, roll them out into a snake about 10-12″ long.

Once you have your snake, simply wrap it around your hand, overlapping the ends by about 1-2″ in your palm.

Then, slap your hand, palm side down, onto the counter and roll firmly to make sure the overlapped ends of the dough seal well.

And now, you have proto-bagels!

I was a bit concerned some of mine would Sproing open, but they all stayed nicely together.

Do take time to make sure you roll them firmly to prevent sproinging when boiling or baking.

The Effect of Rising Time

I did an experiment, mainly because I was hungry and didn’t want to wait until the next day to enjoy bagels.

I split the recipe in two and allowed half the bagels a 5-hour rest in the fridge after shaping and the other half a 15-hour rest.

The results? The two batches look almost identical, but the bagels that were allowed a longer rest in the fridge had more chew, definitely.

I wouldn’t sneak either batch to the dog or anything (if I had a dog), but given the choice in the future, I’ll go with the overnight rise.

If you like a less chewy bagel, 5 hours in the refrigerator is more than sufficient.

Even though I preferred the 15-hour asiago bagels to their 5-hour friends, I had no problem enjoying both kinds!

What If I Don’t Have a Baking Stone?

I recommend baking these on a preheated baking stone, letting the stone heat up in the oven for a good 30-45 minutes before baking.

But if you don’t have one, here’s some good news: you can bake the bagels, 3 at a time, in a Dutch oven!

How do I know this? One of my readers, Anthony, asked the question because they didn’t have a baking stone.

I suggested stacking 3 cookie sheets together to have more mass and therefore more heat retention. I didn’t want him to have to do 4 rounds of baking in a Dutch oven, but as he was in a pinch, he went for it, and he said they turned out great.

Note, he made a half recipe, so 6 bagels only required 2 rounds of baking in his Dutch oven. Pretty cool!

Here’s Anthony’s review:

If you’re interested in the whole exchange between the two of us, you can find that discussion below in the comments.

Can I Freeze Asiago Bagels?

Absolutely. I like to slice my bagels once they have cooled completely and then store them in a freezer bag in the freezer.

When I want one, I’ll thaw it in the microwave, which only takes about 15-20 seconds, and then open it up and toast it in my toaster oven.

If you don’t take into account all the mixing and rising and whatnot, homemade bagels are the perfect convenience food!

Other Breakfast Bread Recipes To Try

If you’re a fan of a good carby breakfast, give these other recipes a try.

• Whole Wheat English Muffins I made mine with sprouted wheat flour. They are so much better than store bought English muffins. You gotta try them!
• Pancakes for One The recipe doesn’t have any eggs in it, and it’s easy to scale it up to make pancakes for as many folks as want them. But just in case you don’t want to share, a single recipe makes 3 pancakes just for you.
• German Pancakes (Dutch Baby) My version of German pancakes uses potato in the dough for a heartier and more rustic oven-baked pancake. The center is nice and custardy. Seriously tasty.
• Hawaiian Roll French Toast Muffins Perfect portions of Hawaiian rolls soaked in custard, stuck in muffin tins, topped with streusel then baked. Grab one or two for an easy breakfast, or serve them for brunch

A Note About Measurements

It will help me and other readers so much if you take a moment to rate and leave a review for this recipe.

You can use the stars to rate 1-5 (5 is best), and leave a review in the comments. It helps me make adjustments if any are needed, and comments help others decide whether the recipe is worth making.

Other ways to share include pinning, and/or sharing on your favorite social media platform.

Thank you so much for taking the time!

See Also

Joppie Sauce – The recipe for the dutch sauce

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Thanks for spending some time with me today, friends.

Enjoy the asiago bagels, and have a lovely day.

Watch my New Year’s Brunch Recipe web story here.