What do you usually get when you go to a cafe? Bagels are definitely on my list! Baker J has been working on several new projects, and he told me that one of his idea is to make bagels in-house! He said that his image of a cafe involves people walking around with Iced Americano and bagels for takeout–a very biased perception, but I thought that was plausible.
What is a bagel, after all? And what’s with all the popularity? One can say many things about the origin of bagels, but those have two backgrounds: Polish and Jewish. Bagels originate from the bread that the Jewish population who lived in Poland and called the Yiddish. Due to their religious beliefs, the Yiddish population had separate food culture from other peoples in the region. They created the earliest form of bagels around the 17th Century, which they brought to the United States (and North America, including Canada) as immigrants.
Bagels may have originated in Poland–but they acquired their fame in North America. There are two relatively famous bagel kinds on the continent, New York-style and Montreal-style. New York and Montreal have a sizable Jewish immigrant population (just like pre-war Poland) and preserve some cultural influences from them. The former is thicker and chewier, boiled in salted water as its distinctive feature. It may be more famous due to its depiction in the popular media as a symbol of New York City. On the other hand, the Montreal style does not include salt in its recipe, which makes it less salty than the New York variant. Instead, they boil the dough in honey-flavoured water and bake in a wood-fired oven.
As visible from the last paragraph, the well-known characteristics of a bagel are that it has a hole and that the bakers boil them before baking it. Baker J said that the boiling part makes it difficult to make bagels as a menu at Wicked Cafe because boiling large quantities of bagels may be tricky in a bakery kitchen. He said that once we can make bagels, it would be a welcomed new addition to our menu. People can grab a piece and a cup of coffee to start their busy day or enjoy them on the spot!
He seems to be considering having a half-day trip, just like one I had a few days ago, to do market research for bagels. Let’s see how his new project goes!
