The NY Style Bagel is the original bagel available in the United States, originating from the Jewish community of New York City, and can trace its origins to bagels made by Ashkenazi Jews from Poland.
While various cities around the world have their distinct style of cooking and serving bagels, the concept of the bagel was born on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York.
A NY Style bagel is generally bigger and fatter than an industrial bagel or a wood-fired Montreal-style bagel.
When Jewish refugees from Poland and Eastern Europe arrived in New York City en masse in the 1800s, they brought with them their traditional foods like challah, brisket, knishes, and bagels.
Bagels became so popular among the Jewish community of New York that unions were formed to represent bagel bakers in the city, like “Bagel Bakers Local 338“, which by the early 1910s represented over 300 bagel craftsmen in Manhattan.
Starting in the 1960s, the popularity of the New York-style bagel began to rise even among the non-Jewish population of New York City and beyond.
A New York-style bagel is always boiled in water and malt syrup is added to it for its characteristic taste, texture, and leathery skin.
It is never toasted.
Bagels are traditionally topped with: sesame seeds, poppy seeds, dried onion or garlic, or left plain or brushed with a beaten egg.
My version is gluten-free with a rice and corn flour mix and a filling of salmon and schmear.
The Jewish community of New York City created the bagel with smoked salmon and schmear in the 1930s as a kosher adaptation of Eggs Benedict, which Jews cannot eat because it contains pork and dairy.
- Difficulty: Medium
- Cost: Cheap
- Rest time: 1 Hour
- Preparation time: 15 Minutes
- Cooking methods: Oven, Boiling
- Cuisine: American
- Seasonality: All seasons
Ingredients
- 12 oz rice flour
- 3.5 oz corn flour
- 2 tsp dry yeast
- 4 tsp sugar
- 1 tsp salt
- 4 tbsp malt syrup (or maple syrup)
- to taste sesame seeds (white and black)
- to taste smoked salmon
- to taste schmear (spreadable cheese)
Steps
Combine the yeast with sugar and 1/2 cup of warm water.
Mix the flours, add salt and yeast. Finally, add 3/4 cup of warm water and 2 tablespoons of malt syrup.
Let it rise in an oiled bowl for 1 hour.
Divide into 8 pieces, shape each piece into a sausage-like form, and connect the ends to form a ring.
Place on a baking sheet.
When the water is boiling, add 2 tablespoons of malt syrup and the bagels in groups of three.
Wait for 10 minutes until they float to the surface, then use a slotted spoon to place them on an oiled baking tray.
Garnish with sesame seeds or other toppings of choice.
Bake in the oven at 428°F for 25 minutes.
Once cool, cut in half and fill with spreadable cheese and smoked salmon.
FAQ
Is it true that the NY style bagel is different because of the water used?
Many people claim that the primary difference in taste and texture of a true New York bagel versus other styles of bagels lies in the use of New York tap water, which contains certain minerals credited with making a better bagel.
Specifically, it is attributed to its low calcium content, low magnesium content, and high level of total dissolved solids in New York’s municipal water, each contributing to making the water softer.What is schmear?
Schmear is a word of Germanic origin, equivalent to “spread” or “smear” (usually fat or butter).
In some Germanic languages, it means butter (cf smör/smør in Northern Germanic languages).
The use and spelling of schmear or shmear in American English is a direct borrowing from Yiddish, where its original use referred to cheese.
In modern usage, it extends to anything spreadable, such as cream cheese spread on a bagel.Why add malt syrup to bagels?
The dark brown chewy crust, dense crumb, and distinctive flavor of New York bagels can be attributed to the use of malt syrup.
It provides a slight sweetness and important components like mineral salts, soluble proteins, dough conditioning enzymes, flavor, color, and nutritional materials.
Malt supplements the amylase in wheat flour to provide sugar for fermentation and helps to modify, or relax, the gluten in wheat flour, making it easier to handle.
With malt, bagels bake quickly to a golden finish and are still chewy and crumbly.
Malts are used to soften chocolate and cocoa products as they soften the flavor and can be found in a wide variety of products like baby foods, breakfast cereals, savory crackers, bread, rolls, cereals, and muesli bars, rice cakes, pretzels, beverages, ice creams, cookies, frostings, fillings, soy milk, pet foods, and even pharmaceuticals.
Unlike bagels made with sugar or high fructose corn syrup, bagels with malt syrup are better nutritionally.
There are no fats or cholesterol in malt and a fair amount of vitamins and mineralsWhat is malt syrup and what can it be substituted with in the recipe?
Barley is cleaned and sorted to size, then unloaded into steep cylindrical tanks with conical bottoms and covered with water.
The steeped grain is then transferred to germination beds for an average of 4-7 days before being placed in kilns and dried.
This halts germination without killing the enzymes.
Finally, the dried malted grain is crushed and mashed with a little water to hydrolyze the substance into fermentable sugars, resulting in a syrup that can be evaporated to the desired strength and density.
It can be replaced with maple syrup.
