![]() The traditional sweetener was barley malt, but Claire advised that molasses could be substituted “in a pinch.” New York City’s tap water, low in calcium and magnesium, made it ideal for this purpose. Referencing a New York Times Cooking tutorial by writer and chef, Claire Saffitz, I began making the dough at 9pm on a Saturday night, gathering bread flour, water, salt, active dry yeast, and molasses. My flour-dusted countertop was like a Ouiji board on which I channeled the Jewish bakers of the Lower East Side. But in the spirit of journalistic inquiry, I decided to make bagels in my kitchen in Harlem. I enjoyed the flavor once removed, through the trend of everything seasoning bottled at Trader Joes, stirred into nut butters, and laminated onto croissants and crackers. As a carb-conscious middle-aged woman, bagels were no longer in my morning rotation. ![]() The multi-step process was impressive, and any misstep - under proofing, over boiling - yielded a less than ideal bagel. The raw bagels, stacked in trays in floor-to-ceiling carts, proofed for a second time in a walk-in refrigerator for at least twenty-four hours, after which they were boiled in a vat, and baked in a hot slate oven. Hours later, they cut off thick slabs, then twisted evenly-sized ropes around their palms, their hands moving in a quick and certain rhythm to roll hundreds of perfect rings. Bakers wrangled boulder-sized masses of dough, covering them with plastic for the first proofing. Behind the counter, hundred-pound bags of flour went into a cavernous drum, as a large, medieval-looking hook churned the ingredients. A video produced by Eater shared the story of Utopia Bagels in Queens, New York, a forty-year old business that made 70,000 bagels per week on average. The union was no longer, but the five boroughs of New York City were still home to many iconic bagel shops. In a video from New York University, professor Jacob Remes claimed, “.no one has had a New York bagel since 1967.” With the dissolution of the Beigel Bakers Local 338 union, traditional methods were no longer the standard, which forever altered the taste, texture and flavor of this now ubiquitous bread. His sons, Murray and Marvin, took over the business after his death, and with a combination of mechanization and marketing, the Lender family pushed the bagel out of the “ethnic” section and made it a mainstay of the American breakfast. Harry Lender, a Jewish immigrant baker from Poland, settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and began freezing and distributing bagels to the Catskills and beyond. But they didn’t go mainstream until the 1970s, with the success of Lender’s Bagels, now a staple in the frozen food aisle. The hunger for home was potent in the diaspora, and the union bakers were committed to preserving the time-consuming, labor-intensive methods of preparation.īagel culture spread across the country with the migration of the Jewish community, making way for bakeries like the one I used to frequent in New Jersey. Bagels arrived in New York City with Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and by the 1900s, there were enough bakeries in the Lower East side to form a powerful union, the Beigel Bakers Local 338. A distant cousin of the German pretzel, today’s bagel has its roots in 17th century Poland, where they were threaded through a stick or string and sold as street food. As Maria Balinska describes in her book, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modern Bread, there is evidence of similar ring-shaped breads from Italy to China to ancient Egypt. I considered bagels quintessentially American until I learned that they are in fact an immigrant food with their own complex history. Everything bagels were my favorite, despite the inevitable onion breath and poppy seeds lodged between my teeth. Fresh bagels didn’t need to be cut in half and toasted they could simply be pulled apart into chewy tufts. Early on a Saturday morning, we often got them warm, piled into a brown paper bag. There were classics like sesame seed and pumpernickel, and a rotating cast of exotic flavors, like sun dried tomato, raspberry, and peanut butter. ![]() Piled into wire baskets behind the counter, the bagels wore a satiny gold sheen like a beach tan. The shop’s logo was an illustration of three bagel characters in novelty socks, sneakers and poofy white baker’s hats. In the 1990s, my high school cross country team gathered before meets at "Bagels-4-U” on Main Street, a culinary destination in our three-mile wide town. Years before I went to restaurants with dishes like “scallop mousse” and “seaweed gremolata” on the menu, I was a Jersey girl who loved bagels.
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