Efforts to ‘bagelize’ America: A tough road to hoe

Bagels weren’t served at the family breakfast table when I was growing up in Adrian, Mich. Toast or English muffins were the typical choices from the “bread food group.”

In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing a bagel in the bakery department at the local A&P Store. We went there often. My dad was the store manager. We would go every Sunday when the store was closed, so he could “check the refrigeration.” 

My first encounter with a bagel came when I went off to college at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Bagels were on the menu in the snack bar. Try one, suggested my roommate Rich Kopec, whose family lived in Redford Township near Detroit. 

My first bagel was sort of crispy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside, but kind of bland in flavor. “You’ve got to schmear it with cream cheese,” Rich advised.

 Much better. (I may have invented the “triple schmear.” I’ve since tapered back to become a “double schmear” guy who prefers strawberry-flavored cream cheese on mini blueberry bagels.) 

The ultimate bagel experience, considered a traditional part of American Jewish cuisine, is “lox and a schmear.” That’s a bagel crowned with lox (thin-sliced, cured and cold-smoked salmon), cream cheese, a sliver of tomato, a dotting of capers and raw red onions.

 

As a result of schmearing, the center holes of bagels are shrinking – and even disappearing – in order to accommodate the weight of the toppings. 

Rittika Dhar, a contributor to historycooperative.com, said bagels are known as the “humble bread of Poland,” and the distinguishing characteristic is “boiling the bread before baking it.”

 

Polish bagels developed as a cousin to Bavarian pretzels from Germany in the 1300s, most food historians agree. Bagels became a “common street food in Poland, sold on sidewalks everywhere,” Dhar wrote. 

“As Polish people began to emigrate to the United States in the 1900s, they brought their traditions of making bagels with them,” she said. Bakers employed people to sell bagels from pushcarts on the streets of New York City. 

Traditional bagel dough contains wheat flour (without germ or bran), salt, water and yeast leavening. Most bagel recipes call for the addition of a sweetener to the dough, often barley malt (syrup or crystals), honey, high fructose corn syrup or sugar, with or without eggs, milk or butter. 

Marc Fintz of Davidovich Bakery in the borough of Queens said the excellence of New York-style bagels begins with strict adherence to a “proofing period,” where the dough rests at least 12 hours and is allowed to experience a second rising prior to the “mandatory boiling-before-baking process.”

 

Locals believe the taste of the bagel is favorably influenced by New York City’s soft tap water that contains certain nutrients, including low magnesium and calcium levels. Add salt and barley malt to the water before boiling.

 

Bagels are also big in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but they are slightly different. The dough contains malt and sugar but no salt. The bagels are boiled in water sweetened with honey before being baked in a wood-fired oven. Thus, they are sweeter than the New York bagels and are usually only topped with white sesame seeds.

 

Bakeries in Chicago, Ill., reduced the baking time for bagels by steaming, rather than boiling, the bagel dough while in ovens that are equipped with a steam injection system. 

Slowly but surely, bagels began to ripple out from urban markets across the land. Murray Lender set out to “bagelize” the country in the 1970s with Lender’s Bagels – pre-sliced and frozen.