You start your mornings with it, you spread butter or cream cheese all over it, and you enjoy it with a fresh cup of brewed coffee, but there’s a lot you may not know about it. Get to know your bagel more with these fun facts that you probably were unaware of before.
- Bagels have holes for a reason. The holes in a bagel are created to help the bagels bake faster than they usually would. They also help the store owner or vendor stack them on a dowel or wooden pole.
- It has to be round to be considered a bagel. The word Bagel originally came from the German word “Bougel” meaning “bracelet” and by way of the Yiddish “beygl” which means “ring”.
- Bagels originated in Poland and were brought to America by Jewish immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
- Bagels are a type of bread that is traditionally made from wheat flour, water, yeast, sugar, and salt. They are boiled before being baked, which gives them a distinctive chewy texture.
- The most popular varieties of bagels are plain, sesame, poppy seed, and everything bagels.
- A common misconception is that a bagel is a doughnut with a hole, but they are a bread product that is denser and chewier than a doughnut.
- The largest bagel ever made was over 8 feet in diameter, and required over four hours to bake.
- In New York City, the most traditional place to find an authentic New York-style bagel is from a Jewish-owned deli or bagel shop.
- Bagels have been to space! In 2008, Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff brought 18 sesame bagels from a bakery in Montreal, Canada along with him to space.
- In the early 20th century, there were many Jewish-owned bagel bakeries in New York City, and the bagel became a staple food of the city's Jewish community.