My Homemade Bagel Boards
The lack of bagel boards kept me from tackling bagels, so I decided to make my own bagel boards.
Have a look at the video below.
They're nothing fancy, but they work rather well for a home oven.
Homemade bagel boards.
The board is 14 x 6 x 1" redwood (4 will fit in a home oven).
The heavy duty linen is from art supply store (just heavy duty canvas I've used for years for couche, etc.).
Everything else (screws, handles, etc.) are from Home Depot, where I also bought the board (and had it cut to spec for free).
I soak the boards/linen before putting raw bagels onto the boards; then, into the oven they (the boards with raw bagels) go.
The large handle makes it easy to flip the bagels off the board (onto the baking stone) after a few minutes of baking, a task made more challenging because of large oven mitts.
I would have preferred 5" width, but Home Depot only has 6" redwood (and wouldn't cut it lengthwise).
The upshot is that, now, I can make gigantic bagels.
When the linen needs to be replaced, it's a simple matter of unscrewing the screws, removing the old linen, cutting a new piece, and attaching it to the board with the screws.
Clever! I have been looking at bagel boards online at places like bakedeco but kept telling myself "It's a peice of wood with a handle, why not make it". Looks like you may have given me the inspiration to go to Home Depot and make it happen!
How big is your oven by the way, does it flip easily without worry of hitting the side or top?
Thanks.
That's what I thought too: why pay a small fortune for a piece of wood with canvas overlay?
My oven is the standard American size on a 36" electric stove.
Fibrament's 15 x 20 stone (http://www.bakingstone.com/order.php) is this biggest stone that'll fit in the oven, so I can place 3 boards on top of it (4 is doable, but just more of a challenge).
The boards flip easily as long as the stone is on the bottom third of the oven.
As for the feet I put on them, I'd say you could skip that part and save yourself some money. They're just metal cabinet knobs, but at $2 each x 6 bagel board x 4 feet on each board, that's an extra $48. The boards would slide just fine without the feet.
You could probably do something as easy as stapling canvas over the boards (with a wood staple gun) and be done in 10 minutes.
I chose the 1" depth per Hamelman's suggestion (the dimensions are also Hamelman's).
I don't remember where I read about using redwood, but someone said that's the only way to go (unless you want them to warp or flavor your bagels (think cedar or pine-flavored bagels!), so that's what I bought.
That looks as good a any professional board I've seen Thanks for sharing.
Larry
Thanks.
The original version of my homemade bagel boards have a design flaw: when the board is flipped (assume 3 bagels on it), the bagel near the back of the oven gets squished by the weight of the board. (Oven-spring fixes the bagel, but its still a design flaw.)
The fix: Install legs on the top-left and top-right corner of the board. This prevents the last bagel from being squished when the board is flipped.
The bottom 4 legs are really just decoration (i.e. not installing them will have no effect on the board's function). The top two legs, however, are necessity, unless you want a squished bagel.
I don't see the video or the pictures. Are they still out there? If not, why are these posts still here?
Picture hosting services often go belly-up because there's little money in it for the hosts. When that happens, the pictures disappear.
However there appears to be plenty of descriptive text in the posts, so if you were interested in making bagel boards you'd probably pick up some useful tips.
Just the same as there is a baker who used to frequent TFL called Txfarmer. Here posts are still here and they are classics, but the pictures are missing; to deliberately delete the posts for this reason would be madness.
Lance
Thanks for the reply, that makes sense. And you're right, I read all the text and it is, in fact, quite descriptive and informative. Would have still loved to see the media, but I understand.
When searching old posts, and the photos ae gone, that really bites!
I don't see the link...