The Un-Bagel

[Originally posted on January 3, 2005]

I love bagels.
As a kid I savored the smell of yeasty bagel dough at the local bagel bakery and the soft but chewy taste of a fresh right-out-of-the-oven perfect circle of bageliciousness. The local bakery was a small store front, as all bagel bakeries were, with bins of fresh bagels just waiting inside the front door. The choices were limited; plain, sesame, onion, poppyseed, and garlic. Plain was always the bagel of choice and the most plentiful. And they were cheap. Ten cents each or 3 for a quarter. Then the bagel market went national. A firm began to market some sort of erstaz frozen bagel that bore as much resemblance to a real bagel as ice milk to ice cream. They survives and led the way to bagel store franchises and bread stores that added bagels to their product line.
Some bagel franchise stores weren't bad. They weren't real bagels but they came close and if you lived out in the hinderland (anywhere outside of New York, Florida, or California) they at least were a decent subsititute for the real thing. Usually smaller and not as tastey, these franchise bagels were OK between the infrequent trips to real bagel territory or overnight mail order form H&H in New York. But then the bread store franchises saw the potential of an untapped market and decided to bring the bagel to the masses. And began to change the bagel....
The first changes were flavors of bagels that seemed to appeal to the new bagel market. Some were interesting; I really like Asiago bagels. Some were so-so variations of existing speciality bagels such as pumpernickel and egg. Then came oddities such as sun-dried tomato, jalapeno, cranberry, blueberry, pumpkin. And then sweet dessert bagels that is almost sacrilegious to the very essense of bagelness such as chocolate and cinnamon. The worst was yet to come. Chains such as Panera's changed the baking method of making bagels. They made them more like rolls than bagels, good they are but they are not bagels. Bagels at places like Panera's are not the low calorie/ low carb treats that a plain bagel should be. Of course the prices also went up accordingly.
These psuedo-bagels really aren't bad. They just aren't real bagels. As the popularity of bagels grew with the mass market, the nature of the bagel, both in chain stores and in supermarkets became imitations of the real thing. And, to state this for the first time in this posting, un-Jewish.
Let's face it, no matter what the real origin of the bagel (the facts are in dispute), the bagel is a Jewish bread. As the marketing of the bagel became more intense, the further away from its Jewish roots the commercial bagel became. Many people I know do not know that the Bagel is a Jewish thing and that the bagels they consume in restaurants is not really a bagel but a corporate recreation with all ethnicity pulled out.
The last connection between the real world of bagels and the Macbagel that is so popular right now was made obvious to me the last time I was in Panera's. Every since Panera's began making erstaz bagels, they have also sold an erstaz cream cheese. Not the real thing but still good. If you have had a real cream cheese with bagel treat you might pass this pale imitative expensive stuff up. Panera's also sold a cream cheese and lox variation. I was always careful to ask for cream cheese and SMOKED SALMON because the help never seemed to know what lox was. A bagel with lox and cream cheese is the ultimate Jewish treat. Add a slice of tomato, onion, or cucumber and you have a real classic. And please, none of these flavored bagels. The flavor is in the lox, cream cheese and anything else you add on to it.
I looked in vain for the lox and cream cheese on Panera's menu last time I was there. It was gone. It has been removed from the corporate menu as well. In my opinion, Panera's has removed the last trace of the bagel's Jewish roots. As far as Panera's is concerned, a bagel is just another bread. In most chain bagel joints you can at least pretend you are eating Jewish food if only because the name of the business sounds Jewish. But not in Panera's.
Panera's is now off my bagel buy list. In my hometown, amid the plentitude of fake bagels, there is still a chain bagel that close to the real thing; Breuggers, and they will have to satisfy my bagel fix from now on.