Bagel Trivia | 40 facts about the traditional bread product

Bagels are traditional bread products that originate from Jewish comminities, but are now eaten all over the world, because they are delicious.

Let’s find out more about bagel!

1. A bagel is also historically spelled beigel.
2. The bagel is a bread product originating in the Jewish communities of Poland.
3. It is traditionally shaped by hand into the form of a ring from yeasted wheat dough, roughly hand-sized, that is first boiled for a short time in water and then baked.
4. The result is a dense, chewy, doughy interior with a browned and sometimes crisp exterior.
5. Bagels are often topped with seeds baked on the outer crust, with the traditional ones being poppy and sesame seeds.
6. Some may have salt sprinkled on their surface.
7. There are different dough types, such as whole-grain and rye.
8. The earliest known mention of a boiled-then-baked ring-shaped bread can be found in a 13th-century Arabic cookbook, where they are referred to as ka’ak.
9. Today, bagels are widely associated with Ashkenazi Jews from the 17th century.
10. It was first mentioned in 1610 in Jewish community ordinances in Kraków, Poland.
11. However, bagel-like bread known as obwarzanek was common earlier in Poland as seen in royal family accounts from 1394.
12. Bagels are now a popular bread product in North America and Poland, especially in cities with a large Jewish population, many with alternative ways of making them.
13. Like other bakery products, bagels are available (fresh or frozen, often in many flavors) in many major supermarkets in those cities.
14. The basic roll-with-a-hole design is hundreds of years old.
15. It has other practical advantages besides providing more even cooking and baking of the dough.
16. The hole could be used to thread string or dowels through groups of bagels, allowing easier handling and transportation and more appealing seller displays.
17. New York bagels are big with small holes. They’re boiled briefly before they’re baked—this step helps them emerge from the oven chewy beneath their firm exteriors.
18. In Montreal they pack in extra eggs while swapping out salt for honey in both the boiling water and (usually) the dough itself, which leads to bagels that are more sweet than savory. Montreal bagels are baked in wood-fired ovens that lend the finished product a distinct crunch and char
19. In general, Montreal and NYC have a rivalry about the best bagel.
20. The earliest mention of bagels comes in the 1610 Community Regulations of Krakow, Poland.
21. It indicated that women who had recently given birth should be presented with bagels as a suitable gift.
22. The word “bagel” is derived from the German word “bougel,” meaning “bracelet”, by the way of the Yiddish “beygl”
23. So, flavors are negotiable. Shape is not, since it’s part of its “identity”.
24. Because there’s no legal “standard of identity” that dictates what a so-called bagel must contain in order to be called a “bagel”, bakers who lack the proper respect for the bagel-making tradition can call any old bit of ring-shaped bread a bagel.
25. Under no circumstances should bagels be confused with bialys.
26. Bagels and bialys are both yeasty, circular breads of Polish origin, but bialys omit the all-important boiling step necessary to produce a true bagel.
27. Bagels have been closely tied to the Jewish community since Polish and Russian immigrants brought the Eastern European staple to the New World.
28. The bagel’s quick baking time made it a favorite in Jewish households on Saturday night after the Sabbath and its ban on cooking ended.
29. To protect immigrant workers attempting to meet New York’s growing demand for bagels, an International Beigel Bakers’ Union emerged in the early 1900s.
30. Beigel Bakers’ Local 338 was a particularly notable chapter—its 300 Manhattan bagel-makers banded together to keep their tradition to themselves. Only sons of current members could be offered spots in the union, and the group conducted its meetings almost entirely in Yiddish.
31. The union’s monopoly on bagel baking ended only in the 1960s, with the invention of the automated bagel machine.
32. Due to the bagel’s unique multi-step cooking process, bagel bakeries usually employed men to produce the goods.
33. More specifically two men rolled and shaped the dough, a “kettleman” boiled the bagels, and an “oven man” ensured they were baked to perfection.
34. In June 2008, Canadian-born astronaut Gregory Chamitoff blasted off on a voyage to the International Space Station with 18 sesame bagels as part of his personal cargo allowance.
35. The bagels came from his cousin’s bakery in Montreal, which means there’s still a chance for someone to bring the first New York-style bagels into space.
36. Americans warmed up to the frozen version.
37. In 2007 Durham, N.C. molecular scientist and coffee shop owner Robert Bohannon debuted the Buzzed Bagel, a creation that can pack as much caffeine as a five-ounce cup of drip coffee.
38. Unlike any other type of bread known to man, bagels are dipped in boiling water for approximately 3-5 minutes before going in the oven to get their golden exterior.
39. Bruegger’s owns the title of World’s Largest Bagel.
40. They baked an 868-pound bagel August 27, 2004 at the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse, N.Y. The previous record was set in 1998 at 714 pounds.