Rant #2,218: A Hole Lotta Love

This morning, I had a bagel for breakfast before I sat down to write this Rant.

I don't often have bagels for breakfast; I usually have cereal.

What happened is that this past weekend, I had to have blood work done. After I had that done, there just happened to be a bagel place right next door to the blood work place, so I figured that I should treat myself not only to one bagel, but a dozen of them.

Sure, I wasn't going to eat them all--I ended up giving several of them to my parents--but heck, it is something I don't do often, so why not?

Having not eaten in over 12 hours, the bagel tasted good, but honestly, a Brillo pad would have tasted good at this point after having fasted in preparation for the blood test.

But as I have eaten the bagels through the week up to this morning, I have to say that I am disappointed with the bagels I bought.

There are several ways to make bagels, and the best way--to boil them to a crispness, where the bottoms are chewy and the tops are soft--was not employed here.

What I got was a bagel that is more like a roll, puffy and with a lot of it seemingly uncooked.

The bagels I got are chewy, but not in a good way, because they are so puffy. The flavor is there, but if I wanted a roll, that is what I would have gotten.

Each bagel tastes like your usual kaiser roll, and that is not how a bagel is supposed to be.

In fact, as I worked my way through the bag, several of the bagels didn't even have holes in them.

Bagels have become as American as apple pie, but I am sure most of us know that Eastern European Jews brought them over to this country when they came here in the early 1900s.

Most bagel places were in New York City, and using the heralded water of the city, much like with pizza, New York City bagels became the standard, and they were made with hard bottoms and soft tops.

Decades passed, and bagels became more engrained in the culture of New York City. As people grew up and moved from the city to supposedly greener pastures, they took their yen for bagels with them, and places that made bagels spread from New York City to virtually all over the country.

Ways of making bagels also changed, as the old fashioned way was mixed with new ways to make bagels, including ways to mass produce them and even have frozen bagels where all you had to do was to heat them up in the toaster.

There are still many places that make bagels the old fashioned way, a slower process then the other processes to make this breakfast staple. Jews once dominated ownership of bagel shops, but that has changed, too, as has the number of different bagels one can get--poppy seed, egg, cinnamon bagels, you name it, and it can be, well, "bageled."

I only went to this particular bagel shop due to its nearness to where I had the blood work done, but I don't think I would ever go there again. To me, they make rolls, not bagels, and with so much of the inside tasting uncooked, even when I heat them up in the toaster oven, they pretty much don't live up to what I want in a bagel.

The funny thing is that we have about four or five bagels shops in about a mile vicinity of my house, so I can really pick and choose what I want in a bagel. And that isn't even counting places like Dunkin' Donuts and Panera Bread, which dot the same landscape and at least to me, produce the worst, mass produced bagels around.

Every bagel, no matter who produces it, should taste like a bagel, and have at least a little bit of the Jewish way within its being; the same could be said for pizza, which should have at least a smidgen of the Italian roots that it came from in its very being.

But a bagel that tastes like an undercooked roll is not my idea of a bagel, and it circumstances permit it, the next time I want a real bagel, I will find somewhere else to purchase what I want.

Now, where is the Temp-Tee cream cheese?