“Whaaat’s the deal with bagels 🥯 ?!”

“Wait - you boil AND bake bagels ?!” 11 year old me was stunned.

Flabbergasted.

Intrigued.

Fascinated.

The only thing I knew about bread and water was that’s what was given to prisoners and when you put water on bread it gets soggy. Needless to say my impressions of boiling water being a cooking technique were a bit limited at the time!

Bagels have fascinated me for some time. Really good bagels are a snippet of heaven. An amazing crispy outer crust that surrounds a head-scratching dense-yet-spongy interior. In a way the bagel is the bread-world’s version of a square-circle.It’s a bit of a mystery. It’s boiled. It’s baked. It’s dense. It’s springy.

Bagels - and I mean REAL bagels - are life changing! Maybe not “winning the lottery” life changing but they’re pretty darn close! Unfortunately, today few people in this Northern California area have truly experienced the mysterious glory of a true bagel. Instead what has been foisted onto people in this region are Frankenbagels .

What do I mean by ‘Frankenbagels’?

Frankenbagels are faux bagels.

They look 👀 like a bagel in some way but the very essence and nature of them is decidedly not that of a bagel. I’m shocked by the sheer number of places that sell these knock-offs. The first clue is the obvious absence of the tantalizing outer crust that’s supposed to accompany a bagel. I say ‘supposed to’ because many bagels today simply do not have this essential part of the bagel. This outer crust is achieved by the process of boiling the blimps (dough bagel). And not some pussyfooting around gentle barely-call-it-a-simmer boil handle-with-kid-gloves but a hardcore witches cauldron mean-as-a-muskrat rolling boil ! This kind of boil sets in motion an amazing reaction that occurs between the hot boiling water and the starches of the flour on the surface of the bagel. Right here bagel alchemy begins to happen!

Not to get into culinary science 🧪 but starches by themselves are amazing little things. They react 💥. They respond. They adapt. Put them into contact with a seething pot of boiling water ♨️ and a process called gelatinization occurs. There are a number of things you can skip on a bagel but not boiling the blimp is a cardinal sin. This process is literally what creates the protective crusty skin around the bagel. No skin? No crust. No crust? No beautiful pillowy interior. If you don’t boil the blimp all you’re being given is a circular roll-with-a-hole. At this point you’re being given a novelty roll not a bagel. It Matters!