The Bagel Takes to the Road

By Mimi Sheraton

Adieu, croissants! Adios, tacos! Make way for the ethnic sandwich vehicle of the moment. The bagel has gone mainstream. Dense and chewy, with a shiny golden brown crust and a center hole, this round Jewish-Eastern European roll has long been a breakfast favorite primarily in New York City and along the Atlantic seaboard. Now it is increasingly appearing on fast-food menus and in the freezers of supermarkets well beyond its ethnic boundaries. Two giant firms have moved into the frozen-bagel business in recent years: Kraft, which owns Lender's, the first and largest producer of frozen bagels, and Sara Lee, which has a line of its own. But primary credit for the yeasty assimilation goes to Burger King, the Pillsbury-owned fast-food chain, which last summer began featuring the bagel nationwide as a breakfast sandwich.

As always happens when specialized foods are mass-merchandised, however, the bagel has been altered to broaden its appeal. As a result, there is a very real question of whether many of the versions now being sold are spiritually and aesthetically still worthy of the name. So far, all are made of the conventional yeast dough, and most are boiled before being baked, thereby taking on the characteristic moist chewiness. But because the classic bagel had a grayish color, was tough to chew and had a shelf life of about two hours, bromate dough conditioners and softeners have gradually been added to new products in the past 20 years. Burger King has added to the acculturation process with such fillers for its bagel as eggs, cheese, ham and bacon. All are far cries from the fillers cherished by bagel mavens: "Novy" (smoked Nova Scotia-style salmon) or lox (brine-cured salmon) and cream cheese (known colloquially as a schmear).

Even traditional bagel bakers have trivialized the product by adding such flavors as pumpernickel, onion, poppy or sesame seed, and even cinnamon and raisin. The Big Apple Bagels shops in the Chicago area offer among their variations, incredibly enough, one with banana and nuts. Lender's has just introduced Big 'n Crusty, 50% larger than its regular product and looking like a sort of dimpled Superdome modeled in dough. Brothers Murray and Marvin Lender have recently expanded their Connecticut-based chain of bagel restaurants, S. Kinder (a play on the Yiddish Ess, Kinder ((Eat, children))), into Manhattan, where they offer a blueberry-studded bagel. Says Murray Lender, son of the company's founder: "The Brooklyn traditionalist would probably break out in hives at the mention of a blueberry bagel."

Convinced that most of the specimens distributed nationally are imposters, Big Apple Baking Co. in Brooklyn (no connection to the Chicago shops) last spring began marketing what it considers to be more authentic New York-style bagels. Vows Company President Allen Kent: "We will not prostitute the bagel." Despite that promise, Big Apple's version, which substitutes steaming for the boiling process, turns out to be soft and spongy.

Bagels are meeting with success in unlikely areas. In the busiest Burger King outlet in St. Louis, around 30% of the breakfast crowd chooses them. Celia Burton orders one there every Thursday morning, to nosh on as she studies her Bible portion for that night's meeting of the Jehovah's Witnesses. "I just love them," says Burton, who was converted to bagels four months ago. Another devotee is David Atwater, 19, a Burger King customer in Scottsdale, Ariz. Says he: "I can have a bagel and be full for the morning. I'd have to have two croissants to get the same feeling." Bagels are making inroads even in the South, bastion of the fluffy biscuit. "Is that one of those round things?" asked a customer as she and her husband decided to try bagels in Columbia, S.C. Though still loyal to biscuits, she was impressed with what she tasted.

Nevertheless, to this Brooklyn traditionalist, almost everything about bagels these days is irritating, including the obscene practice of eating them hot or, worse yet, toasted. Years ago, eating a bagel was not just a simple pleasure; it was a confrontation. To bite into one in the morning, freshly baked but cool, was to have the jaw muscles vibrate until dinnertime. Now neatness, of all things, is a requirement. Burger King's dough is modified so customers can bite cleanly into its sandwiches without squeezing the fillings out.

Big Apple's Kent says, "Hold an authentic New York bagel to your ear, and you can hear the traffic." Hold most of today's bagels up to your ear, and all you hear is a cash register ringing.

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York and Andy Taylor/Miami