The bagel is a food traditionally made of yeasted wheat dough in the form of a roughly hand-sized ring which is boiled and then baked. The result is a dense, chewy, doughy interior with a browned and sometimes crisp exterior.
It often features seeds, such as poppy or sesame, baked on the outer crust. Other flavor varieties include: salt, onion, garlic, egg, pumpernickel, cinnamon-raisin, "everything", cheese, caraway, whole wheat, multigrain, blueberry, muesli and others. A related bread product is a bialy, which has no hole, is often onion or garlic-flavored, and is less crispy on the outside. A key ingredient is it's high-gluten flour.
New York, Montreal and Quebec City are North America's bagel capitals.
The Bagel's History
The bagel originated in Central Europe, probably in Poland. A 1610 document from Krakow mentions "beygls" given as a gift to women in childbirth. This is often cited as the earliest known reference to the bagel, but the document is not clear what a "beygl" is; it may be what is now known as a bagel, it may be something related to the word for stirrup "beugal", or something else the meaning of which is lost to history.
Bagel slicerAn often repeated story says that the bagel originated in 1683, when a baker from Vienna created them as a gift to King Jan Sobieski of Poland to commemorate the King's victory over the Turks that year. The baked good was fashioned in the form of a stirrup to commemorate the victorious cavalry charge. That the name bagel originated from "beugal" (stirrup) is considered plausible by many both from the similarities of the word and due to the fact that traditional handmade bagels are not perfectly circular but rather slightly stirrup shaped. More prosaically, the name may simply originate from the Yiddish word "bugel" or the German word "bugel", meaning a round loaf of bread (see Gugelhupf for a German cake with a similar ring shape).
Immigrants in the 1880s brought the bagel to New York City, where it continues to flourish. Until the 1920s it was rare in other parts of the United States other than a few cities with large Eastern European Jewish communities. The bagel came into much more general use throughout North America in the last quarter of the 20th century. Specialized devices have even been invented to allow for easy slicing of bagels without "squishing" them (a perceived "danger" when using a knife and hand).
Bagel types
The two most prominent styles of traditional bagel in North America are the Montreal bagel and the New York bagel. The Montreal bagel contains malt and egg and no salt; it is boiled in honey-sweetened water before baking in a wood oven; and it is predominantly either of the noir/"black seed" (poppy) or blanc/"white seed" (sesame seed) variety. The New York bagel contains salt and malt, is available in a wider variety of flavors (though Montreal's oldest bagel institution is quickly catching up), and is also boiled prior to baking in a standard oven. The resulting New York bagel is puffy with a noticeable crust, while the celebrated Montreal bagel is smaller (though with a larger hole) chewier, sweeter and even less like a frozen supermarket-variety "roll-with-a-hole" than the New York bagel.
In addition to the plain bagel, there are variants with seasoning on the outside, including sesame, garlic, poppy seed, onion, rye and the "everything" bagel, a mixture of all of the above. Other versions which change the dough recipe include cinnamon, raisin, pumpernickel, egg and sourdough. In New York City green bagels made with food coloring are sometimes created for St. Patrick's Day. In Montreal, places that sell "New York-style" bagels rarely become popular with the local populace.
In the late 20th century, many variations on the bagel flourished, including those made with different types of doughs, and with new non-traditional foods and seasonings added to the dough. Breakfast bagels, a rather softer, sweeter variety usually sold in fruity or sweet flavors (cherry, strawberry, blueberry, cinnamon-raisin, chocolate chip, ...) are commonly sold by large supermarket chains; these are usually sold pre-sliced and are intended to be prepared in a toaster and often are served with jam (though they may also be eaten with the more traditional cream cheese as well, especially fruit-flavored cream cheese). More traditionally flavored bagels (e.g., plain, or onion) are commonly used to make sandwiches with egg, cheese, ham, and other popular breakfast foods.
