My family is pretty obsessed with bagels. Every week we head over to Boichik Bagels, located in Berkeley, to grab some bagels–rated the best in the country by the New York Times–and watch the bagel robot in action.
I was excited, then, when the kids baking kit company I Am the Chef Too reached out to me and offered a cool idea. In collaboration with Pixar for the launch of their new movie, Elemental, I Am the Chef Too created a unique bagel-making kit with an Elemental theme.
Of course, I asked them to send me one right away!
The Baking Basics
I Am the Chef Too allows kids to participate in the kitchen with simple recipes that are fun for them to make. In this case, the bagel-making kit came with little baggies, which contain the necessary ingredients, premeasured and ready to go.
That’s nice, because sometimes just measuring the ingredients can be a challenge for the littlest kids!
I did the kit with my six-year-old, three-year-old, and two-year-old. Everybody got to participate, but with three brothers in the kitchen, baking sometimes became a contact sport.
We started by mixing the yeast into the water, and letting it bloom. We added some sugar, and everybody got to take a turn mixing in whole wheat flour.
My six-year-old put on the gloves included in the kit in order to knead the dough on the countertop. A couple of extra sets of gloves would’ve been nice, as it was hard to convince everybody else not to get involved too.
Hand-washing was required!
Blue Bagels
Next, we added some drops of food coloring that were included in the kit. The idea here is to make bagels for the colors of the various Elemental characters. For anyone who’s seen the movie, the characters represent different elements like fire, water, wind, etc.
Naturally, my son, who was wearing the gloves, was not the only one who wanted to add food coloring into their bagel! He ended up with pristine fingers, and everyone else got blue hands.
After we had added in our colors, we formed the dough into long snakes and then into a bagel shape. We then brushed it with an egg wash and I carefully placed them into an oven heated to 375°.
We had a bit of a delay in getting started with the baking because the recipe didn’t specify to preheat the oven. But after a little wait, the bagels were in.
The kit does include some toppings, like an everything bagel topping that I put on my bagel. After about 12 minutes in the oven, our bagels were ready!
The Results
I think they look pretty cool. My oldest son, who was wearing the gloves, was most liberal with his application of food coloring and ended up with the most colorful bagel.
The instructions say they only need a few drops, but really we needed about half the bottle of blue food coloring to make this stunningly marbled blue bagel.
My bagel had more subtle blue streaks with a bit of orange, but still looked pretty cool.
Overall, it was a lot of fun to bake the Elemental Bagels. The kit may not be in stock by the time you read this, but there are tons of other themed kits from I Am the Chef Too.
From my experience, the kits are the best fit for an older kid – five and up feels like a good age range for this craft. We’re definitely not at the Boichik Bagels level yet, it was a fun experience to cook with the kids and also to see how our cherished bagels are actually made.
