Simply delicious … bagelicious!

For those who are not familiar with them, we would like to point out that a bagel is by no means an “ordinary roll just with a hole in it”. We produce our bagels according to original American recipes with original American ingredients.

Traditionally, the dough for bagels is prepared of flour, water, yeast, sugar, and salt but, however, without fat. After being shaped into rings, the dough is kept cool for one day at around 4 degrees Celsius, which allows for the typical skin to form on the outside. The next day, the raw bagels are dumped into boiling hot water and then baked in the oven. In a bakery, the raw bagels which have been formed by a dough processing machine are directly put into the big oven where steam is added before the actual baking. This is how the finished bagel gets its specific consistency: it has a very delicate crust on the outside and is soft but chewy on the inside.

As early as the 17th century, the bagel was very popular with the Jewish population in Eastern Europe. On the Sabbath, when religious Jews were not allowed to make fire nor to work, they let the yeast dough rest. After sunset, when the Sabbath had ended, the chilled raw bagels were “revived” from the Sabbath rest by being put into boiling water. Then just bake them, and you had bread fresh from the oven on a Saturday evening.

Legend has it that in 1683, a Jewish master baker in Vienna baked a bread shaped like a stirrup, a beugal as it was called in those days. It was a personal token of his thanks to the King of Poland, a passionate horseman who had helped the Austrians to defend themselves against a Turkish army besieging the city. In Yiddish, those delicious bread rings were called beygels or beigels. As bubliki, they even made their way into Russia. At the end of the 19th century, Jewish emigrants from Europe brought the bagel to the U.S. and Canada.

From New York and Montreal, the “bagel capitals” of North America, the yeast dough ring eventually returned back to Europe. Thus the story of the bagel resembles its own shape – the bagel has come full circle!

The American Bagel Company produces ready-baked bagels which are delivered fresh from the oven, as well as pre-baked bagels and raw bagels which are deep frozen and delivered worldwide by expert logistics partners.