Bagel

A chewy doughnut-shaped yeast roll with a shiny crust, due to the fact that it is boiled in water before being baked. The word "bagel" was used in the U.S. for the first time, by some accounts, in 1932; it is a variation on the Yiddish beygl or beigel, and the German word beugel, which means "a round loaf of bread." Historically, the bagel is an Ashkenazi (central, northern or eastern European), rather than a Sephardi (Portuguese or Spanish) food. As one expert in Jewish history, Claudia Roden, explains: "Because of their shape - with no beginning and no end - bagels symbolize the eternal circle of life." Interestingly, the first discovered mention of the bagel was in 1610 in Krakow, Poland, when a piece of literature referred to it as something to give to women in labor. According to another legend, in 1683, a Jewish baker shaped dough into the form of a riding stirrup to honor King Sobieski of Poland, a skilled horseman who had saved the Austrian people from Turkish invaders.

Today, bagels are made in hundreds of flavors and incarnations. Generally speaking, there are two basic types of bagels. Water bagels are made without eggs and are chewier because they don't contain any added fat. Egg bagels are, obviously, made with eggs and are softer and more similar in texture to egg bread, such as challah. Montreal-style bagels are egg bagels made without salt, but with the addition of malt. They are boiled in honey-sweetened water, which gives them their characteristic sweet taste and dense texture, and topped with either sesame seeds or poppy seeds - no other fancy toppings are added to a Montreal-style bagel - then baked in a wood-fired oven. New York-style bagels contain malt and salt, come in a variety of flavors and are baked in gas or brick ovens, giving them a puffier, lighter texture.

Bagels have grown to outsell doughnuts in the United States. The Einstein/Noah Bagel Corp. sold more than 300 million bagels in 2002 (more than five million a week).

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