Bagel

• 1. Introduction

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  The bagel first appears in writing in 1610, in the Community Regulations of Kraków, Poland. That rule book lists it as a gift for women in childbirth. The linguist Leo Rosten points to this entry in his book The Joys of Yiddish, as the earliest known mention of the Polish word bajgiel. A bagel is a ring of wheat dough, shaped by hand, briefly boiled, and then baked. Today it is a popular bread in North America and Poland, especially in cities with large Jewish populations. How did a ring of bread given to new mothers travel so far? Why do bakers boil a dough that most breads never touch with water? And why does one city treat the simple act of toasting it as an insult?

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• 2. Roots Of The Ring

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  A 13th-century Syrian cookbook already describes a ring-shaped bread that was boiled first and baked afterward. Circles of dough have a long and varied history across Europe and Asia, so the bagel arrived in a crowded family.

  In Poland, a similar bread called obwarzanek appears in royal family accounts from 1394. That is more than two centuries before the Kraków ordinance. Where the bagel itself came from is less certain.

  One story credits Bona Sforza, a woman from Bari, Italy. She became Queen of Poland and Grand Duchess of Lithuania as the second wife of Sigismund the Old, and she held those titles from 1518 to 1548. Another theory points to pretzels made in Germany and carried to Poland by immigrants. Both ideas are offered as possibilities rather than settled history.

  The name followed its own route. It comes from the Yiddish word beygal, which in turn comes from a German dialect word, beugel, meaning ring or bracelet. In the 16th century and the first half of the 17th, the bajgiel became a staple of Polish cooking. From the 17th century onward, bagels were widely associated with Ashkenazi Jews.

  The basic design, a roll with a hole, is hundreds of years old. The hole lets the dough cook evenly, and it lets bakers and sellers thread bagels onto a string or dowel for handling, transport and display.

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• 3. Boil Then Bake

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  With a hydration of around 50-57%, bagel dough is among the stiffest of all bread doughs. Traditional dough uses wheat flour with the germ and bran removed, plus salt, water and yeast. Bakers prefer bread flour or another high-gluten flour, because it gives the firm, dense, spongy body and the chewy bite.

  Most recipes add a sweetener. Barley malt, either as syrup or crystals, is common, and so are honey, high fructose corn syrup and plain sugar. Some bakers also add eggs, milk or butter. The dough can be raised with a sourdough method or with commercial yeast.

  The traditional method moves in stages. After mixing and kneading, the baker shapes the dough from a long thin piece into a round with a hole in the middle. The shaped bagels then proof for at least 12 hours at a low temperature. Each one is boiled for 60-90 seconds in water that may contain lye, baking soda, barley malt syrup or honey. Only then does it go into the oven. This sequence gives the bagel its distinctive taste, its chewy texture and its shiny surface.

  A newer variant, sometimes called the steam bagel, skips the boiling. The bagels bake in an oven fitted with steam injection. Commercial bakers like this route because the bagels are handled directly only once, at the shaping stage. After that they stay in their pans, are refrigerated, and go straight into the steam oven.

  The result is fluffier, softer and less chewy, closer to a finger roll that happens to be ring-shaped. Because steam is neutral water rather than an alkaline bath, the dough is made more alkaline on purpose to help it brown.

  Bagels also freeze well, and they can be kept frozen for up to six months.

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• 4. To Toast Or Not

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  In 2012, a Consumer Reports article set out what an ideal bagel should be. It should have a slightly crispy crust and the flavor of bread freshly baked. When you bite or pinch off a piece, it should show a distinct pull. The inside should be chewy. Onion, garlic, sesame seeds or poppy seeds cooked on top can complement the taste.

  Toasting changes the picture. It can bring chewiness out or take it away, it can soften the crust, and it can moderate off-flavors.

  A typical bagel carries 260-350 kcal, 1.0-4.5 grams of fat, 330-660 milligrams of sodium and 2-5 grams of fiber. Gluten-free bagels often contain much more fat, around 9 grams, because the ingredients that replace wheat flour add it.

  In New York City, toasting is a fighting subject. Traditionally, New Yorkers argue that a well-made, fresh bagel should never be toasted. Murray's in Chelsea and Ess-a-Bagel at 21st and Third Avenue have both kept no-toasting policies. Toasting there is considered a bastardization and a sacrilege. Mimi Sheraton, a former New York Times food critic, went further and called the practice obscene.

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• 5. Regional Rivals

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  The New York bagel contains malt and is cold-fermented for several days, which builds flavor and strengthens the crust. It is boiled in salted water and baked in a standard oven. The finished bagel has a fluffy interior and a chewy crust.

  According to CNN, Brooklynites credit the quality of their local water. Steven Fassberg, CEO of Brooklyn Water Bagels, says the formula and the preparation method explain the result.

  Montreal goes another way. Its bagel contains malt and sugar but no salt, and it is boiled in honey-sweetened water before baking in a wood-fired oven. White sesame seeds dominate. Toronto bagels, by contrast, resemble New York's. They are less sweet, usually coated with poppy seeds, and baked in a standard oven.

  The St. Louis bagel is defined by the knife, not the recipe. It is sliced vertically several times instead of once horizontally, usually into eight pieces with a bread slicer. The St. Louis Bread Company, now known as Panera Bread, popularized the style. The cuts add surface area for spreads such as cream cheese or butter. The cost is portability, and the cut pieces cannot become a sandwich.

  Chicago-style bagels are baked with steam. American chef John Mitzewich has a recipe he calls San Francisco-style, which gives a flatter bagel with a rough-textured crust. The traditional London bagel, also spelled beigel, is sweeter, chewier and denser.

  In Austria, the beigl, also written beigerl or beugerl, is a traditional Lenten food. The dough is rolled very thin, briefly boiled in salted water, topped with salt and caraway seeds, and baked. Some are baked until brittle. At Easter, the tradition of Beiglreißen has two people pull opposite ends of a beigl until it breaks, and tearing off the larger piece is meant to bring good luck. In Vienna, Eastern Lower Austria and Burgenland, beugerl has also come to mean certain kinds of kipferl.

  In the late 20th century, variations on the bagel flourished. Doughs now include pumpernickel, rye, sourdough, bran, whole wheat and multigrain. Flavors range from blueberry and cinnamon raisin to garlic, cheese and chocolate chip. Green bagels are sometimes made for St. Patrick's Day.

  One oddity is the flagel, a flat bagel. A review attributed to a Village Voice food critic says Brooklyn's Tasty Bagels deli created it in the early 1990s. It can still be found in a few places around New York City, Long Island and Toronto.

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• 6. Machines And Markets

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  Polish Jewish immigrants brought the bagel to the United States, and a thriving business grew up in New York City. For decades, Bagel Bakers Local 338 controlled it. The union held contracts with nearly all bagel bakeries in and around the city, and its workers made every bagel by hand.

  Around 1900, the bagel brunch became popular in New York. It pairs a bagel with lox, cream cheese, capers, tomato and red onion. These combinations of toppings have stayed linked to bagels in the United States into the 21st century.

  Automation changed the trade. Daniel Thompson began work on the first commercially viable bagel machine in 1958. Harry Lender, his son Murray Lender and Florence Sender leased the technology. In the 1960s they pioneered automated production and distribution of frozen bagels. Murray also invented pre-slicing the bagel. With machines doing the shaping, the bagel spread across North America in the last quarter of the 20th century.

  The bagel itself grew. In earlier years it weighed around 2 ounces, and by 1915 the average was about 3 ounces. The size climbed further from the 1960s. By 2003, the average bagel sold from a Manhattan coffee cart weighed around 6 ounces.

  The American Institute of Baking tracked the supermarket market. For the 52 weeks ending the 27th of January 2009, the top eight fresh brands took in US$430,185,378 on 142,669,901 packages. Thomas' led the list, followed by Sara Lee and then private label brands.

  For the 52 weeks ending the 11th of April 2012, fresh bagel sales in US supermarkets, excluding Wal-Mart, reached US$626.9 million. A bag of fresh bagels averaged $3.27, while a bag of frozen ones averaged $1.23.

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• 7. Rings Around The World

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  Brick Lane, in London, has sold bagels since the middle of the 19th century. Locals spell the word beigel. Bakeries there displayed them in their windows on racks of vertical wooden dowels, some up to a metre long.

  In Japan, the first kosher bagels arrived from New York in 1989. BagelK made green tea, chocolate, maple-nut and banana-nut flavors for that market. Some Japanese bagels are soft and sweet. Others, such as the Einstein Bros. bagels sold by Costco in Japan, match the American version.

  In Istanbul, archival sources show that the ring-shaped simit has been baked since 1525. Üsküdar court records from 1593 standardized its weight and price for the first time. The 17th-century traveler Evliya Çelebi wrote that Istanbul had 70 simit bakeries in the 1630s.

  The painter Jean Brindesi showed simit sellers in his early 19th-century oil paintings of daily life. Warwick Goble illustrated them in 1906. Simit is sometimes marketed today as a Turkish bagel. It looks much like the twisted, sesame-sprinkled bagels pictured for sale in early 20th-century Poland. Both were sold from baskets or carts in the street. A saltier, fattier Turkish form is called açma.

  Other relatives turn up elsewhere. Bubliki are eaten in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Like Poland's obwarzanek, they are usually topped with sesame and poppy seeds, but the dough includes butter and sometimes milk. Italy has taralli. The Uyghurs of Xinjiang, China, eat girdeh nan, whose name comes from the Persian for round bread. Germany has the Dortmunder Salzkuchen, which dates to the 19th century.

  Jerusalem has its own ring, ka'ak al-Quds, often called the Jerusalem bagel in English. It is oblong, usually topped with sesame, and unlike a true bagel it is never boiled before baking.

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• 8. Bagels In Language And Song

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  Among Yeshivish speakers, a bagel is also a unit of sleep. Saying "I slept a bagel last night" means sleeping 12 hours straight. People disagree about the origin. It may refer to the 12-hour rest the dough needs, or to the circle the hour hand traces around a clock face in 12 hours.

  In tennis, a bagel means winning a set 6-0, and winning a match 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 is called a triple bagel.

  The term bageling describes a Jewish person using a Jewish word or phrase near a stranger who is clearly Jewish too. The aim is to signal that they share the same background.

  Music has a bagel too. Bublichki, also called Bagelach, is a famous Russian and Yiddish song written in Odesa in the 1920s. The Barry Sisters, with the Ziggy Elman Orchestra, made it popular in the United States in 1939. It remains in the repertoire of klezmer, jazz and pop musicians.

  The newest appearance is on screen. In the 2022 science-fiction film Everything Everywhere All at Once, a bagel is a major plot device.

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