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[Crippler]

Both Corners and Olivers in Dongguan usually carry frozen bagels in various flavors

[Nolefan]

I've tried a couple of recipes that turned out more or less ok but the best way i found was this baby.

Homemade bagel recipe

4 cups bread flour

1 Tbls sugar

1 1/2 tsps salt

1 Tbls vegetable oil

2 tsps instant yeast

1-1/4- 1-1/2 cups of warm water.

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. You don't have to worry about soaking the yeast when you use instant yeast (most yeast sold these days is instant yeast). The dough should feel stiff, but add the extra water if it's really stiff, or you can't get all the dry flour incorporated.

Plop the dough down onto the counter, and knead for about ten minutes, or until the dough is uniform and smooth.

Cut the dough into 8 equal sized balls, and let rest for 10-20 minutes.

Pre heat your oven to 425.

Now, take each of the dough balls and using two hands, roll it into a little snake on the counter. When the snake is longer than the width of your two hands, wrap it around your dominant roiling hand. The dough rope should be wrapped so the overlapping ends are together at your palm, near the start of your fingers. Now take the two overlapping ends, and use your palm to squish/roll these two ends together. Once the dough is fused, you should have a perfectly circular bagel-to-be! This is the only part of the process that can take a little practice before your bagels will look really professional. Don't get discouraged if they don't look perfect, it just takes practice!

Let your bagels rest on the counter for about 20 minutes, and meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil, and grease a large baking tray lightly. You can just rub a splash of vegetable oil and rub it around.

After the 20 minute wait, your bagels will start to look puffy, and it's time to get them boiling! Add them as many at a time as you can to your boiling water without crowding them. Boil for about a minute, turn them over, and boil for another minute. Take them out a let dry for a minute and then place them on your oiled baking tray. Repeat until all the bagels are boiled.

Add the tray to the oven, and after 10 minutes, flip the bagels over, bake for another ten minutes; and they're done!

[Yokie Kuma]

Confirmed in Shekou Shenzhen.  A local NY'er taught a local bakery how to make them.

They are for sale in just about every coffee shop and convenience store.  Fresh daily.

I'm from Philly.  They rank as a 5 or 6 (if fresh) based on the Philly scale from 1 to 10.

[seamallowance]

Y'all just trying to torture the rest of us, right?

There are no bagels within a 100 miles of this here hayseed little town. No pizza, either.

I know where you can buy a gob of tasteless, gooey, white, steamed bread though.

[Pashley]

Dunkin Donuts,, at least the Minhang location in suburban Shanghai, have bagels. They don't look all that appealing.

For the cream cheese, Metro have both Philadephia and kilo packages of an antipodean brand, cheap & good.

[xwarrior]

Y'all just trying to torture the rest of us, right?

I think they are! We might all live in the same country but we may as well be on different planets.

While some search for the best bagel place the rest of us subsist on variations of rice and noodle dishes.

 Bagels? Bagels! I would love to find a loaf of bread that tastes like bread.

PS I am not an American so I am not familiar with 'bagels'. Do they look something like this?   

[xwarrior]

Sorry - I did not mean to go off about bagels. It was one of those 'case of the vapours'  things brought on by:
- sitting in a feezing cold room through 4 hours of Oral English examinations
- ploughing through another plate of 4RMB Chao mian in a village restaurant
- watching the thermometer crawl to 0C by 1pm

I think one of the challenges in China is trying to find something that we take for granted at home. It is something like those reality TV shows where contestants are given incredibly difficult tasks and have to complete them using all of their intelligence and rat-cunning.

So it is in China. I can still remember the excitement of discovering butter, after months of fruitlessly searching the CBD, in a small shop down a very narrow sidestreet; I am still looking out for a shop that has real cheese.

I wish all bagel hunters good luck in your search. May the gods lead you on the path to culinary paradise.

PS While you are searching could you please keep an eye out for jars of Marmite. If you do not like the taste of Marmite on bagels you are welcome to send the jars to me 

[piglet]

I actually have a spare jar of marmite Xwarrior, cause my best mate just brought me a new squeezee bottle from London on her last trip and I still have my old fashioned trad glass bottle.
But I am a bit far away :-(

[xwarrior]

But I am a bit far away :-(

... so near, yet so far!

Thanks for the offer piglet. Very kind of you. It is another item you could add to your list of things not available in most (if not all) places in China.
 

[piglet]

right then I'll bring it with me 

[mlaeux]

I'm sad to report that there are no bagels in my little town either, but fortunately we can find cheese and butter, although I haven't seen anything that resembles Philadelphia Cream Cheese, but there is plenty of that European Laughing Cow type creme cheese to be found.

Just a side note: since the place seems to be over run with Koreans, you can find pancake mix, doughnut mix and decent chocolate.

Sorry xwarrior - no marmite.

[LaowaiSaosao]

Chengdu has them, either frozen imported in Sabvrina's import store or made locally by Leanna's Bakery. And you can get all the accmpaniments too, including smoked salmon and cream cheese! Life here really is pretty good...

[The Local Dialect]

For those of you living in a bagel-less wasteland, I was browsing Taobao today and came across this shop http://sabrinas.taobao.com/ . They sell frozen bagels, among various other Western goodies, and you can get these goodies delivered straight to your door no matter where you live. The shop is in Chengdu and the prices are a tad more expensive than what we pay for imported stuff in Beijing, but I'd be willing to pay more to get the occasional treat if I was living in the boonies.

[piglet]

AND they have McVitie's Digestive Biscuits as well 

[Raoul F. Duke]

Inexplicably, Marmite (and its bastard cousin Vegemite) are pretty easy to find in China... my theory is that the Chinese finally got as tired of the whining as we are.  Most purveyors of imported items, including Shanghai's City Supermarket, carry various forms of them.

I found them useful for sealing plumbing joints in my apartments. It wasn't until much later that I learned some humans actually consider them as food.

But now back to the topic: Bagels.
I'm overwhelmed that they're becoming so widespread in China. There's hope for these people yet.

Bagels may have a Jewish origin, but they're not a traditional Israeli or Sephardic thing at all. They came out of the Diaspora in Europe, and reached their full flowering in New York City...still home to the very best ones. Despite a strong presence in London for over 150 years, NYC is where they went from an obscure Polish Ashkenazi staple to the ruling bread-type pastry of North America and beyond. Although Anthony Bourdain, noted food expert and rabid New Yorker, swears there's a place around Montreal that beats anything New York can offer.  Actually, though, it makes sense...as we all know, Canadians are always  anxious to copy the best of American culture, and Montreal is sort of the international "Second City" for the Bagel Arts. Today the world's bagels are divided into New York Style and Montreal Style, with the Montreal bagels being slightly smaller and sweeter than the dominant NYC form.
Not to mention rarely seen outside Canada.

Sorry...I really like bagels a LOT.