Attempting the Viral Protein Bagels

Sofia Losure

As a lover of cooking, baking, and healthy eating, I take pride in the fact that most of my diet consists of homemade foods. But as a busy, bagel-loving college student, I admit that I purchase bagels (or snag them at Woodlawn Dining Commons) on an almost daily basis. If you have ever attempted to make bagels from scratch, you’ll know that the process, while not impossible by any means, is multi-hour and fairly involved (water bath, multiple rises, difficult-to-knead dough). With my current schedule, weekly homemade bagels are just not feasible.

Another aspect of being a lover of cooking, baking, and healthy eating is that my social media feed is flooded with recipes, many of which follow the trend of increasing the protein content of various dishes. Most high-protein recipes are unconvincing to me (a protein shake cannot equate to a Dairy Queen blizzard, etc.), but there is one recipe that has made an impression: Greek yogurt bagels. I have seen dozens of cooks promoting the dish on social media, most of them advertising their recipes as having few ingredients, being wildly simple to make, containing relatively more protein than regular bagels, and tasting delicious. And trust me, if it is possible to easily make a healthier bagel at home, I will be doing so on a weekly basis. In this article, I will take you through my first attempt at homemade Greek yogurt bagels.

Some of the top-liked TikTok bagel recipes are from eatpayylove, thesamplan, and healthyovenbakes. I decided to use this top-liked video from eatpayylove as my main reference.

While the measurements vary across recipes, the ingredients needed for these bagels are low-fat Greek yogurt, all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, and an egg to wash on top. The process involves combining the dry ingredients, incorporating the Greek yogurt and mixing until a dough forms, forming the dough into bagel shapes, adding the egg wash and toppings, and baking for thirty minutes. Easy.

I started with 2 cups of flour, ¼ tsp salt, 2 tsp baking powder, and 1.5 cups of Greek yogurt (the measurements that eatpayylove uses). My dough was too dry, so I ended up adding two more spoonfuls of Greek yogurt and mixed until the dough was at a consistency that I was satisfied with.

I then formed the dough into four bagels and placed them on a foil baking sheet. Lastly, I added the egg wash on top of each bagel, and sprinkled everything bagel seasoning on half of them, and cinnamon sugar on the other half.

I baked them at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 32 minutes. I got the following result:

While not the most visually beautiful bagels of all time, I would certainly consider these bagels a success, taste and texture-wise. Their texture resembles that of a traditional bagel almost exactly. Their taste lacks the yeast and fermented wheat flavors that I generally associate with bagels, but that is to be expected, as the recipe omits both the yeast and barley malt syrup that are usually included. I would consider these “bagels” a delicious carb that is bread-flavored and bagel-textured.

As far as nutrition goes, I calculated these bagels to contain roughly 16 grams of protein, whereas regular bagels have roughly 10. Not an astounding increase here, but an increase nonetheless. The WOW factor of these bagels, for me, is that, excluding baking time, I completed every other step of the recipe in roughly 15 minutes. Additionally, the ingredients of this recipe are indeed incredibly simple, as I already had all of them in my apartment before deciding to make these bagels.

Overall, I will, in fact, be making this recipe on a weekly basis from here on out. If you enjoy bagels and simple, better-for-you recipes, I recommend that you try making Greek yogurt bagels, too.