That’s not a bagel . . .

We need to talk. No. Really.

You see it’s likely you’ve fallen and didn’t even know it.

What you THOUGHT was a “bagel” was just a crappy piece of shiny styrofoam-esque “bread” that’s been painted with coloring and pumped full of anti-microbial chemicals to preserve “freshness”. Except you can’t actually have a 4-day old “fresh” bagel. It’s contradictory kind of like a square-circle. And just imagine if microbes don’t like eating that bread because it’s brimming with chemicals that ward off staleness imagine what your gut biome thinks about digesting such nonsense. You deserve better but you just didn’t know it.

Unfortunately in this part of the world real, true, genuine, authentic bagels aren’t readily available. Go to the east coast, especially the New York area, and bagelries are everywhere. Some good, some meh, and some are great. But the ubiquity of available bagels makes it easy for folks to gain a sense of what a bagel ought to be. It should be boiled, it ought to be hand rolled, it ought to be crispy on the outside and dense but pillowy on the inside and so on. But out here in these parts of actual Northern California it’s quite the desert when it comes to a bagel experience.

What I’ve been encountering is how folks try a TOB and then immediately are confused because a TOB does not share the same attributes (thank goodness!!) that a Linders or Thomas bagel shares. Those bagels have to contend with “shelf life”. This is the dilemma of most food products in stores. Throw in convenience and lack of availability and it’s no wonder at all that folks think that a Linders bagel or Thomas’ bagel are the benchmarks for what a bagel are. But, alas, they are not.

The first issue is that bagels by nature were never meant to be a food product that was supposed to sit in a bag on a shelf for days and days before being consumed. No. Quite the opposite. Bagels are ideally meant to be eaten minutes to hours removed from the oven. Not days or (gasp!) weeks. Curious things happen to the bread starches of a bagel over time. Some of these effects can be thwarted by toasting the bagel and thus resuscittating it to its near just-removed oven status. But even those measures have their limited capabilities. Eventually nature really takes hold and says “enough . . . it’s mine now”.

In many ways the essence of the bagel can’t actually be fully appreciated unless it’s within that precious golden window of opportunity. And no amount of pumped-in “preservatives” can do anything about it. But, sadly, that’s what most “bag-o-bagels” offer in a store and folks don’t (and wouldn’t) know any differently.

We’re here to change that!

TOBs are REAL. AMAZING. BAGELS. because they’re not pumped full of those chemicals. They’re hand rolled. They’re cold proofed. They’re boiled. They’re steam baked. And they’re REAAAAAALLY good!