Bagel Run
In my family there is a legend that goes back to my days of owning a house in the Hamptons (technically in the town of Quiogue, which means “little clam” in the language of the native Montaukett tribe). I owned that house from 1989 until 2003 and used it as my weekend respite where I would take my children for our time together. We spent time in the pool, we built a treehouse and we watched lots and lots of movies in the den. The house was on a small peninsula that jutted out into Quantuck Bay (hence, looking like a small clam) and the town that served Quiogue was Westhampton Beach, a short bicycle ride across Turkey Bridge on Main Street into town. THe town of Westhampton Beach is a pleasant Hamptons town with a wide Main Street with lots of seasonal touristy stores and galleries, but also with a wonderful bakery that drew a large crowd daily, but an especially large crowd on Sunday mornings during the summer season, when the Hamptons were in their prime. Before heading off the the pool or beach or any other weekend activities, the New Yorkers that frequented these old shore towns like to give their guests and family some nice warm baked goods. While there were lots of bakery options at the Beach Bakery, ranging from bear claws and muffins to scones and crumb cake, the bakery knew its New York audience well and they had a seemingly limitless supply of fresh-baked bagels in the best of New York City fashion.
If you’ve never seen bagels being made in the traditional manner, it is worth watching. The ingredients are not so different from other baked goods. There is white bread flour, salt, dark soft brown sugar, water, bicarbonate soda and yeast, which can be used to make many kinds of bakery items. The difference with New York style bagels is that these rings of dough are then placed into boiling water for several minutes before putting them into the oven with various and multiple toppings. It is that step of boiling the bagels that give them the name “water bagels” and what gives them the combination of a crispy exterior shell and a chewy inner core that we have all come to love. An interesting factoid is that many people like to take their split bagels and toast them the way we do with many other baked items before cream cheese or butter or lox and capers are applied, but it is said that a true New Yorker would never deign to toast a bagel which has been properly cooked. The purist just places a schmeer of cream cheese on a sliced bagel and enjoys the naturally crispy shell and chewy interior.
Seeing bagels made in the old world fashion seems very primitive. There are lots of wooden racks and messy work areas with rubber-aproned bakers. The bagels come out of the boiling water in which they float, they are placed face-down into pans of toppings ranging from crispy onions to sesame seeds or poppy seeds and finally the catchall everything bin that has bits and pieces of all the toppings. Those coated, not and wet bagels are then placed face up on a moving metal conveyor rack that take the bagels through the super-heated oven until they fall unceremoniously into a stainless steel bin at the bottom where they are gathered and bucketed according to their topping flavors for placement in the bakery display bins. This operation, as I have seen it on Long Island many years ago, is not a pristine and tech-based process, but rather a somewhat primordial one that looks very homemade and rustic. Baking is often a hot, sweaty activity, and that is only more so with bagel baking, given the added step of the use of boiling water. Nevertheless, the product coming out the back end of the process always looks very delectable to me and many others. I think we assume that somewhere between the boiling and baking, anything approximating a germ has been throughly eliminated. I’m certain the truth is very different, but the mouth-watering sentiment overcomes any of that reality.
So, every Sunday I was at my house in Quiogue, rain or shine, I would ride my bicycle or motorcycle, or perhaps take my car to go and wait in line at the bakery to buy a supply of bagels and sweets for the household to enjoy. While there are always people who prefer sesame or plain bagels, and even a cinnamon raisin bagel, by far the most popular bagel has always been the everything bagel. I guess it is part of the “I want it all” mentality that pervades our culture, but it may also be the combined flavors since you can now buy everything bagel crackers (a Trader Joe’s delicacy) and even everything bagel topping all by itself for you to add to whatever edibles you choose. Since we know that no good deed goes unpunished in life, I still suffer from a holdover reputation with my kids about those days of bringing home Sunday bagels. My daughter swears that I used to wear a “bagel suit” during those trips. That would be a matching top and bottom sweat suit that looks casual while being very designer-purposeful. I know I have never owned such a suit, having always been turned off by the “track suit” trend, but that hasn’t stopped the family stories of me and my bagel suit being part of my family urban/Hamptons legend.
While no one has ever produced a photo or any other shred of evidence of me in my bagel suit, I am reminded of that reputation every Sunday to this day. You see, I have stayed the course of my Sunday bagel run, even out here in Escondido. There are more than enough transplanted New Yorkers and the appeal of the bagel has transported itself easily to the west coast. While you can always buy bagels in the bread section of your local grocer here or anywhere in the United States, you must have a local bagel baker that understands the boiling/baking process to be able to get real bagels. And we are fortunate here to have just that. The Signature Deli is owned by a baker of German descent who apparently learned his old world baking skills in the Old Country, as testified to by his thick Germanic accent and pleasant manner. While it is usually the Hispanic store helpers that I see early on Sunday mornings, I am clearly known as a regular at the store and usually call in my order ahead of time so that I can skip the Sunday morning bakery line, which is still much shorter than anything I saw a quarter century ago in Westhampton Beach.
Food is a very local thing for the most part and out here, Mexican food is more the norm than anything else. That means that the local “bread” is some combination of corn or flour tacos just as pita and naan are the norms in the Middle East and Subcontinent. So, while bagels have traveled west, they have hardly become ubiquitous. In an area this populous there would be more bagel shops if this were in the east, but out here I often run into local who don’t know what a bagel is. That happens all the time with local day laborers who are mostly Hispanic. The only thing stranger than the bagel itself is the placing of cream cheese on it.
Today I go on my bagel run for Kim and me and whatever visitors are on hand. But I also buy two everything bagels for Mike & Melisa and occasionally for Faraj & Yasuko. I have clearly started a habit for Mike, who seems to enjoy his bagel plain (that is, an everything bagel with no cream cheese), ripped apart piece by piece as we talk at the kitchen table. Melisa picks at hers throughout the day. As for Faraj and Yasuko, Persia/Iran favor sangak, barbari, taftoon, and lavash but Japan is harder to define. There is pan, but more commonly, the Japanese combine bread with a sweat filling to create Kashipan. I’m not sure a bagel, even one with everything on it, cuts it for Faraj & Yasuko. But preference or not for bagels has rarely deterred me from my weekly bagel run.