It’s time to find out how much you really know about bagels! Here’s some tips, tricks and trivia that can help make you the most bagel savvy person on the planet.
First, the tips!
- Never, ever, ever ever ever try to slice a bagel while you are holding it in your hand. Hold the bagel down on a flat, immovable surface – a counter or cutting board, rather than a plate or a platter – with the open palm of your hand. Carefully, carefully slice the bagel horizontally using a serrated knife; go slowly and take your time. An even better idea? Invest in a bagel slicer. They don‘t cost that much, and are certainly cheaper then ending up in the ER!
- That said, pre-slice bagels before freezing. Slicing a frozen bagel is highly dangerous and almost impossible!
- Freeze bagels as soon after purchase as possible, using a heavy ziplock bag with the air squeezed out. Freezing a stale bagel won’t magically make it not stale, so freeze when fresh!
- Fresh Bagels like New York bagels will keep for a day or two on the counter – in a plastic bag, not a paper one. They’ll quickly go stale in paper, so switch them to a plastic bag if you want them to taste good tomorrow.
Now the tricks:
- Bagel a little hard? Wrap it in a moistened heavy duty paper towel and pop in the microwave for 15 seconds. Voila! Warm bagel, not soggy, perfectly chewy and ready to eat!
- Have a crying, teething baby in the house? A frozen bagel is an automatic, safe and healthy teething ring. (Make sure you retrieve it before it thaws enough that chunks can be bitten off and swallowed.)
- Got a job interview or the possibility of a drug test in your future? Save that receipt. Proving you ate a poppy seed bagel before a random test could mean the difference between your employer realizing you had a false positive result and getting the pink slip for drug use!
And finally, the trivia:
- Bagels have their own day! February 9th is National Bagel Day, and more bagels are sold on that day than any other day of the year.
- Literally millions of bagels are consumed every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (The best bagels, of course, are new Yorker bagels.)
- The most popular bagel remains the plain bagel, closely followed by the sesame. What can we say? Sometimes simplicity is best. (this shouldn’t keep you from trying other kinds of bagels, though. We have over a dozen distinct flavors!)
- The biggest bagel was created by Bruegger’s Bagels, weighed 868 lbs, and used 660 lbs of flour to make. They displaced a 563 lb bagel created by Murray’s.
There you have it. Now you can be the best educated bagel enthusiast on the planet!