![]() ![]() Watch the full video to see more of what goes into Utopia Bagel’s process. “The one problem you’re going to have with my bagel, is once you eat it, you’re just not going to want any other bagel.” ![]() It takes an individual to be at the top of his game to make it good,” Spellman says. ![]() Serving Size: 1 regular: Amount Per Serving. Get full nutrition facts and other common serving sizes of Bagel including 1 miniature and 1 oz. “ any craft, making it by hand is special. There are 270 calories in 1 regular Bagel. And rollers are a dying breed.It’s not like there’s a school for bagel rollers,” he says standing over one of his employees, Henry, who has perfected the art of bagel rolling during his 27 years at the bakery. “It’s the rolling that really keeps it soft. A machine, he explains, pumps the dough over and over again, tightening it up. Spellman attributes his shop’s notoriety to two things: Having skilled workers make bagels by hand, and keeping everything - from the ingredients, to the kettle, to the oven, to the baking techniques - the same as they were 40 years ago when the shop first opened.Īnother element that Spellman believes is absolutely necessary to making a good bagel is hand-rolling the dough, versus having a machine create the round shape. It’s those techniques that make our bagels what they are.” The wildly popular Queens, NY shop is famous for its fresh bagels with soft, airy dough and a crisp crust. “Those are the things that are not talked enough about. It’s how much water you put in, it’s how much, when you proof, you let in the air,” Spellman says. Identifying the best choice is also how I deal. But the doughy, chewy, shiny, boiled-then-baked, fresh, crunchy crusted bagel that Americans know and love is a Jewish and New York City creation.“If water was the main thing that happened to a bagel that makes it great, there are about five bagel stores around my store here - they would make as good of a bagel as we make,” says Utopia Bagel shop co-owner Scott Spellman on the myth that New York City water is what gives its bagels the reputation as the best in the country. bagels, cheese-covered bagels, or multigrain bagels (basically white bread. Montreal has their own (also truly excellent) signature style. No, the bagel that we know and love today belongs deep in the veins of New Yorkers and Jews. The Polish and Eastern European bagels they were based on were much smaller and harder - and they definitely never put lox or a schmear of cream cheese on their bagel, as New Yorkers started to do in the following decades. A lox and egg sandwich from High Street on Hudson. It was cheap, it was reminiscent of their old country, but it was uniquely New York. The bagels were looped and stacked onto sticks and carried through the streets of the Lower East Side, selling out quickly. And they were all so obsessed with bagels, that the bagel bakers became unionized, with almost 300 bakers represented and coveted membership passing only through the sons of current members. When my great-grandfather escaped Russia by leaving behind everything he knew to come on a boat to New York at the age of 12, he was met by a teeming population of like-minded Jews. On the contrary, it is an ode to the hard-working bakers who have taken their bagel knowledge (learned mostly from New York) and flung it further afield so that more people can experience the pure joy of a top-notch bagel. If you actually read past the headline, you might notice that the article itself isn't actually about ranking bagels. Takeout from the Upper East Side Russ and Daughters Café on a picnic table in Central Park: bagels, bialy, whitefish salad and their incomparable Hot Smoke/Cold Smoke salmon. Obviously, as someone who loves her local bagels, I was offended on behalf of my beloved city but as the headline kept glaring out at me across my social media feeds, it started to irk me for different reasons. As a Jewish woman living in New York, I couldn't even count how many people sent the article to me (usually accompanied by a lot of choice expletives). Now is probably not the time to pit restaurants against each other … one would think.īut then, on Monday, The New York Times published an article by California restaurant critic Tejal Rao with a headline that declared, “The Best Bagels are In California (Sorry New York)," and the internet lost its collective mind. And this week, help is finally on the way in the form of a $28.6 billion grant program, built into the American Rescue Plan, specifically for struggling restaurants and bars. For the past year, restaurants have been begging for help amid unprecedented shutdowns and a historic era of racial and cultural reckoning.
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