Easy Paleo Bagels

This recipe adheres to the paleo diet and is free of refined sugar, dairy and gluten. With just four main ingredients, it doesn’t get any easier than this!

1. Gluten-Free Baking Flour: I love using Bob’s Red Mill 1-to-1 Baking Flour for this recipe! While this flour is typically used to make baked goods like cookies, it also works well for this bagel recipe because it uses xanthan gum to bind the ingredients.
2. Dairy-Free Coconut Yogurt: Sticking to the paleo diet, we use dairy-fee coconut yogurt in place of greek yogurt here. The yogurt keeps the inside of the bagels delicious and moist!
3. Baking Powder: In order to get our bagels nice and fluffy, baking powder is used to help the dough rise. Since we aren’t waiting for the dough itself to rise over a period of time before baking, baking powder is used to increase the volume and lighten the texture of baked goods.
4. Salt: Finally, a bit of salt is added to this bagel recipe. The salt helps balance out the sweetness from the coconut yogurt and gives this recipe the classic bagel taste.

You’ll notice that this recipe also doesn’t use eggs! So, how do the ingredients stay together? Well, the gluten-free flour has xanthan gum, which acts as a binder. Xanthan gum is often used in gluten-free baking to not only act as a substitute to gluten, which is a binder, but it also acts as a thickener.

How to Form the Perfect Bagel

When working with this dough, you’ll notice it’s very sticky. To save you all the trouble, I tested this recipe both in the air fryer and in the oven. When I used the air fryer, I ran into a number of problems. For starters, it was very difficult to form the shape of the bagels with the dough. Once I was able to form somewhat of a bagel shape, then I had to flip it after about 15 minutes in the air fryer. Although I had greased the air fryer to prevent sticking, the bottom of the bagel still stuck to the air fryer. Overall, this recipe was just more difficult than need be and didn’t yield the best bagels. While the outside of the bagels were delicious and crispy, the inside was not thoroughly cooked and came out doughy. Even with more time in the air fryer, the outside crisped up but the inside remained doughy.

So, we move on to the oven! In order to avoid the initial problem I ran into with the airfare, which was forming the bagels, I used a silicone donut pan. While I try not to use anything in my recipes that cannot easily be found in the home, this pan is a MUST when baking this bagel recipe! Not only was it much easier to make the bagels, thanks to the preformed pan, but they came out perfect! No need to flip the bagels here, the bagels cooked thoroughly and came out with a golden exterior and moist, yet cooked, interior.

The Final Step

Once the bagels are formed and in the silicone pan, the last step is to brush them with an egg mixture. The egg mixture prevents the tops of the bagels from burning and allows the most important ingredient to stick to the tops. What is the most important ingredient you ask? Well, you can’t have good bagels without Trader Joe’s Everything But the Bagel Seasoning!

If you haven’t tried this seasoning, it’s a must have for any and all recipes. With it’s sesame seeds and garlic salt, it’s perfect for eggs, rice, fish and more! And of course, it’s the signature ingredient for our bagels. To make the egg mixture, whisk together three eggs until thoroughly combined. Then, add your seasoning to the mixture and use a basting brush to coat the tops of the bagels. That’s it! It really doesn’t get easier than this recipe.