Tasty. I ended up using about 8 cups of flour.. another 1 .5 cups before kneading and then about another .5 cups when rolling out the strips. I topped with more coarse salt and pepper. I liked the texture of the outside..The inside is very much like a biscuit. I was expecting a different texture, but it's good. I liked this dipped in seasoned olive oil. I made 22 of these instead of 12.. they came out about the size of a bagel. Bake about 22 minutes @450

The good news is that these taste pretty darned good, for a fairly simple biscuit. Slightly eggy, nice and peppery, big and fairly dense. They definitely taste better warmed, though I didn't try them with the suggested coffee or espresso. The slightly bad news (which a previous reviewer ran into) is that they are kind of difficult for inexperienced bakers to make. I consider myself a low-intermediate baker by now, but I've never made anything like this. I was pretty sure I measured 6 cups of flour, and not 5, and the dough was quite wet and sticky. I slightly panicked and tossed in another cup or so, and tried to continue. The dough was still fairly sticky, such that I didn't think it possible or worthwhile to do the "scoring the perimeter" step, so I skipped that. I baked the first half-dozen for 20 minutes; then I added another half-cup of flour or so to the remaining dough, and baked the second half-dozen for 22 minutes. The second batch turned out better, being slightly browned on top. Lastly, I guess I was expecting these to look somewhat like bagels, if not pretzels, but the outside texture was slightly bumpy and irregular. As I said, these did taste pretty good, but the recipe threw me some curves along the way. I just hope the results I got were close enough to what I was supposed to get.

The dough came out so wet and gooey that you could not form anything. I even tried to add more flour to make the dough more durable and nothing worked.

Excellent makes a great substitute for bread. An Italian bagel.