60 Fun Facts About Bagel

Bagels originated in the Jewish communities of which country?

The earliest known written mention is in Kraków's Jewish community regulations of 1610.

What cooking step, done before baking, gives a traditional bagel its chewy interior and shiny crust?

Each ring gets 60 to 90 seconds in water that may contain lye, baking soda, barley malt or honey.

Which two seeds are the traditional toppings baked onto a bagel's crust?

Salt grains are the other classic option; garlic and onion flakes joined the mix later and were eventually combined into the everything bagel.

The classic New York 'bagel brunch' tops a bagel with cream cheese and which cured fish?

The combination, with capers, tomato and red onion, caught on in New York around 1900 and has never let go.

What is the traditional shape of a bagel, in the language of geometry?

The hole is practical as well as pretty: it lets the dough cook evenly and lets bakers string dozens on a dowel for carrying and display.

In tennis, what score in a set is nicknamed a 'bagel'?

Win three sets that way and you have served a 'triple bagel'.

A bagel with all the toppings is a plot device in which Oscar-winning 2022 film?

In the film the bagel is a black hole with literally everything in the multiverse piled onto it.

The Montreal-style bagel is boiled in water sweetened with what before baking?

It also contains egg and malt but no salt, and is baked in a wood-fired oven, which is why it comes out thinner, sweeter and denser than a New York bagel.

Bagel Bites, the frozen pizza-bagel snack, are made by which food giant?

Heinz picked up the brand in its $500 million purchase of John Labatt Co. assets in 1991; the snacks are still made in Southwest Florida.

Which bagel spread was 'married' to a giant Lender's bagel in a 1984 publicity stunt?

When Kraft bought Lender's, Murray Lender walked a six-foot bagel named Len down the aisle to a bride named Phyl.

What did Harry Lender's bakery accidentally reveal in 1956 after two years of secrecy?

Customers were angry at first, then realised these were the same bagels they had happily eaten for two years, and Lender's started marketing them frozen.

Which bagel cousin has an onion-filled depression instead of a hole and skips the water bath?

It comes from Białystok, whose Jewish community was destroyed in the Holocaust, and survives mainly in New York bakeries.

Which US city names the bagel style 'sliced' vertically into eight thin pieces?

The style was popularised by the St. Louis Bread Company, better known today as Panera Bread.

Traditionalist New Yorkers insist a fresh bagel should never be what?

Some Manhattan shops, including Ess-a-Bagel, have had outright no-toasting policies, and critic Mimi Sheraton called the practice obscene.

In which Polish city do the 1610 community regulations first mention the bagel?

The ordinances record bagels being given as gifts to women in childbirth.

The Yiddish word behind 'bagel' derives from a German dialect word meaning what?

The Polish form bajgiel and the London spelling beigel come from the same root.

Which Italian-born queen is sometimes credited with bringing the bagel to Kraków in the 16th century?

She was from Bari and married Sigismund the Old in 1518; another theory traces the bagel to German pretzels instead.

Which numbered union controlled New York City's hand-rolled bagel trade for decades?

By the early 1910s it represented more than 300 bagel craftsmen in Manhattan alone.

Who started work in 1958 on the first commercially viable bagel-making machine?

The Lenders leased the very first one in 1963; with three unskilled workers it did the job of eight skilled hand-rollers.

Roughly how much did the average bagel sold from a Manhattan coffee cart weigh by 2003?

Bagels started at about 2 ounces, reached 3 by 1915 and started ballooning again in the 1960s.

Which spelling of the word do London's Brick Lane bakeries traditionally use?

They have been sold there since the mid-19th century, displayed on vertical wooden dowels up to a metre long.

For how long is a traditional bagel dough proofed at low temperature before it hits the water?

That long cold rest is one theory behind the Yeshivish slang 'sleeping a bagel', meaning twelve hours straight.

What is a 'flagel'?

It is credited to Brooklyn's Tasty Bagels deli in the early 1990s and is mostly found around New York, Long Island and Toronto.

Montreal-style bagels are the only bagels known to have gone where?

Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff, who grew up in Montreal, took three bags of sesame bagels on the shuttle and to the ISS.

Which two Montreal bagel shops both claim to be the oldest in the city?

Fairmount was set up by Jack Shlafman in 1919 and St-Viateur by Chaim Seligman and Myer Lewkowicz in 1957.

Per Gil Marks, the bagel with lox and schmear was a 1930s kosher adaptation of which dish?

Eggs Benedict breaks two dietary laws at once, pork and mixing meat with dairy, so New York's Jews built a bagel version.

Which company created the Einstein Bros. Bagels chain in 1995 to sell breakfast?

It stitched together four regional chains from cities with no bagel tradition, and later became part of Panera Brands in 2021.

Noah's Bagels, sold to Einstein Bros. for $100 million in 1996, was founded in which city?

Noah Alper opened the first shop on College Avenue; the chain had 38 stores by the time it was sold.

Which skateboarder fronted Bagel Bites' early-2000s marketing push aimed at tween boys?

The partnership was credited with a 32 percent jump in consumption.

Where did Bagel Bites originate before Heinz bought the business?

Inventors Bob Mosher and Stanley Garczynski sold the company to John Labatt Co., and the snacks are still made in Southwest Florida.

Which frozen-food giant bought Lender's Bagels in 1984?

Kraft sold it to Kellogg for $455 million in 1996, and it has since passed through Aurora, Pinnacle, Conagra and Bimbo.

Lender's began in 1927 in which Connecticut city?

Harry Lender bought his Oak Street bakery for $600 after arriving from Lublin; the site is now the Murray Lender Playground.

What did the Washington Post call Murray Lender when he died in 2012?

He also invented pre-slicing, put green bagels out for St. Patrick's Day and made oval bagels for LBJ to eat in the Oval Office.

Which Turkish ring bread, made in Istanbul since at least 1525, is sometimes sold as a 'Turkish bagel'?

Traveller Evliya Çelebi counted 70 simit bakeries in Istanbul in the 1630s.

Ka'ak al-Quds, the Jerusalem bagel, differs from a bagel in what key way?

Bialys skip the boil too, which is part of why purists say neither is really a bagel at all.

A 1977 Newsday article places one of the earliest everything-bagel mentions at Bagel Master in which Long Island town?

David Gussin, Joe Bastianich, Seth Godin and Brandon Steiner have all claimed the invention, with Steiner dating his to 1973 at age 14.

In which year did the New York Times run Eric Asimov's line about 'the Lender's Line'?

Fresh-bagel chains were booming that year, which is also why analysts panned Kellogg's purchase of a frozen brand.

A dough hydration of around 50-57 percent makes bagel dough what, compared with other breads?

That stiffness is why bread flour or other high-gluten flours are preferred to get the chewy, dense-but-spongy crumb.

The 'steam bagel' variant skips which traditional step?

It is baked in a steam-injection oven instead, and comes out fluffier and softer, closer to a finger roll shaped like a bagel.

In Austria, the thin boiled ring called a beigl is a traditional food for which season?

At Easter two people pull a beigl apart, and whoever gets the bigger piece is supposed to get the luck.

A Kraków baker's guild was making obwarzanek ring bread for Lent as far back as which century?

Royal accounts from 1394 record it, roughly two centuries before the bagel shows up in Kraków's Jewish ordinances.

The first kosher bagels reached Japan in 1989 through which company?

It went on to invent green tea, chocolate, maple-nut and banana-nut flavours for the Japanese market.

Which Yeshivish slang meaning is attached to the word 'bagel'?

One theory ties it to the 12-hour rest bagel dough needs; another notes the hour hand traces a bagel shape in 12 hours.

Which hardware feature distinguishes an authentic Montreal bagel bakery from a New York one?

Add honey in the poaching water and egg in the dough and you have the full Montreal method.

Harry Lender's 1927 New Haven shop was one of the first US bagel bakeries set up where?

New Haven then had 25,000 Jewish residents, almost a sixth of the city, and Saturday night was the bakery's busiest shift ahead of Sunday-morning sales.

Which mail-order cartoon mascot promoted Lender's Bagels in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

It followed 'bagel heads', tiny decorated bagels made in the likeness of the leaders at the 1983 G7 summit.

Which food-safety milestone did Lender's claim as one of the first products to adopt voluntarily?

Murray Lender pitched bagels as the natural alternative as white bread's popularity fell.

Which former New York Times food critic wrote The Bialy Eaters (2000), about the bagel's cousin from Białystok?

She is also the critic who called toasting a bagel 'obscene'.

According to a 2012 Consumer Reports article, which of these is a mark of an ideal bagel?

The magazine also rated Lender's Original among the best store-bought bagels that year, to loud objections from New York.

Bagels are boiled for how long before they go into the oven, under the traditional method?

Longer boils give a thicker, chewier crust, which is why some bakers time it to the second.

Which of the following is claimed to explain the taste of a New York bagel by many of its fans?

Brooklyn baker Peter Shelsky disagrees: he points to great New York-style bagels in New Jersey and Long Island and says it is know-how, not water.

Which frozen-bagel pioneer is credited with inventing the pre-sliced bagel?

With his father Harry and Florence Sender he leased Daniel Thompson's machine and pioneered frozen bagel distribution in the 1960s.

According to Leo Rosten, bagels were given as a gift to which group in 17th-century Kraków?

Rosten's The Joys of Yiddish cites the 1610 community regulations as the first known mention of the Polish word bajgiel.

Roughly how much did an average American bagel weigh in 1915?

They had started at around 2 ounces, and by 2003 the average Manhattan coffee-cart bagel was about 6 ounces.

How were beigels traditionally displayed in the windows of London's Brick Lane bakeries?

The dowels could be up to a metre long, and the local spelling and pronunciation survive to this day.

Which US city's bagels are baked with steam rather than boiled?

Chef John Mitzewich's San Francisco-style bagel is another regional variant, flatter with a rough-textured crust.

In the Austrian Easter custom of Beiglreißen, what happens to a beigl?

Whoever tears off the larger piece is meant to get good luck; the thin, briefly boiled rings are topped with salt and caraway.

Which brand led US supermarket sales of fresh bagels in 2008, according to the American Institute of Baking?

Sara Lee and private-label brands came next; Lender's, by then owned by Pinnacle Foods, sat sixth on the list.

Which sister act made the Odesa song 'Bublichki' popular in the US in 1939?

Recorded with the Ziggy Elman Orchestra, the Russian-Yiddish tune is still a klezmer and jazz standard.

In tennis slang, what is winning a match 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 called?

A single 6-0 set is a plain bagel, named for the zero-shaped scoreline.