Making the dough

• In the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with a dough hook, combine the warm water, sourdough discard, sugar and yeast. Give it a quick whisk, cover it with a tea towel and let it sit for approximately 10-15 minutes. Or until it's quite bubbly.
  2 cups warm water, 2 tbsp sugar, 3.5 tsp instant dry yeast, 1/2 cup sourdough discard
• Next, add the salt, any seasoning that you'd like to mix into the dough, and 5 cups of the flour. Reserve a half cup of flour in order to slowly add it to the dough as it's mixing if needed.
  2 tsp salt, 1 tbsp everything bagel seasoning, 5-5.5 cups unbleached all purpose flour
• Let the mixer run on low speed until the dough starts to pull away from the bowl, slowly adding a tablespoon or so of flour at a time as needed if the dough seems to sticky.
• Once the dough is mostly pulling away from the bowl, turn your mixer to medium speed and let it run for 10 or so minutes.
• Once the dough has come together nicely and is not too sticky, grease the inside of a bowl and some plastic wrap. Place the dough in the bowl and cover with the greased plastic wrap. Put into a warm place and let it rest until it's doubled in size.

  I like to let my dough rise in my oven with the light on. It provides just enough warmth to help the dough along without making it to hot.
• Once the dough has doubled in size, remove it from the bowl onto a lightly floured surface. Knead it for a minute or so until it's a nice smooth texture.
• Fill a large stove pot with water and 2 tablespoons of sugar. Get it to a good boil.
  1 full pot of water, 2 tbsp sugar
• In the meantime, you're going to shape your bagels.

  Decide how many bagels you'd like to have. Six very large, eight regular size or 12 small size.

  For eight bagels, you're going to cut the dough in half. Next, you'll cut those halves in half. Making four equal-ish sections. Now, you want to roll those 4 pieces into balls. And then you'll cut each of those four dough balls in half. Now you've got eight!

  For six bagels, you want to start by cutting the large dough ball into thirds. Then roll each piece into a ball and cut each third in half. That will leave you with six.

  For twelve smaller bagels, start by cutting the large dough ball in half. Then cut those two halves in half also. You'll have four pieces of dough. Next, roll each piece into a ball and cut them into thirds. That will leave you with twelve.
• To make the hole in the center of each bagel, poke a hole with a floured finger and gently work the hole open a bit. Watch the video in this post to see how I do this.
• Preheat your oven to 400℉ and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. NOT WAX PAPER.
• Once your bagels are shaped and the water is boiling rapidly, drop a few (2 or 3) bagels into the pot. Count to 30, flip them over and count to 30 again.

  Remove them from the pot onto the parchment paper lined baking sheet and sprinkle seasoning on top now while they're still wet, if you want seasoning.
• Once all the bagels have been in their water bath and are seasoned, bake them for 25 minutes at 400℉.

  This time will vary if you're making smaller or larger bagels. Smaller bagels will take less time and larger ones will take more.
• Serve warm and enjoy!