The bagel (from Yiddish בײגל beygl) is a bread product traditionally made of yeasted wheat dough in the form of a roughly hand-sized ring which is boiled in water and then baked. The result is a dense, chewy, doughy interior with a browned and sometimes crisp exterior. Bagels are often topped with seeds baked onto the outer crust with the most traditional being poppy or sesame seeds.
It has become a staple bread product in the United States and Canada, especially in cities with large Jewish populations, such as New York and Montreal, each with different ways of making the bagel. It is also very popular in Eastern European countries such as Poland and Lithuania where it is often thought to have been invented by a Jewish baker as early as 1610 in Kraków, Poland.
A related bread product is a bialy, which has just a depression rather than a hole, is usually onion or garlic-flavored, and is less crispy on the outside; it is not boiled before being baked.
Though often made with sugar, malt syrup, or honey, bagels should not be confused with doughnuts. -Wikipedia.org |
