Bagel Baking Next Level

I once dated a woman descended from an early American president. And that represented, like, her Puerto Rican side. On her other side, she traced back to the first white baby in America. One night, we dined in an antique store, and I mentioned the antiques (which she was facing away from and had barely glanced at as she'd entered the restaurant and been seated).

"Those aren't antiques," she declared.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I can feel it," she replied, spearing a shrimp with her fork.

I've waited for years to uncover some similar heritage-based super power, and I think I've got it.

I've read a zillion bagel baking recipes, but the photos always turn me right off (it's the same process that accounts for shitty pizza and Wynton Marsalis, where drek becomes so pandemic that it becomes the standard which everyone calibrates to and aims for).

But there's this physicist who recreates anthropological baking methods, who also deeply respects his Jewish heritage's bagel tradition, who set his mind to reverse engineering the real old-school process, creating a stupendous tutorial on Twitter.

And I know, from the photos, that they're serious. How do I know? I can feel it.

It's not just that they're grabby-looking, though they are. I can detect the soul of the ones my Russian-Jewish grandfather would bring us from deepest, darkest Brooklyn in the late 1960s baked by guys with concentration camp tattoos on their forearms.

The recipe, like all bagel recipes, seems like a bit of a pain. Lots of ingredients and materials to gather. You must construct bagel boards with food grade burlap and copper nails, and there's kneading and rising and other tedia I've happily avoided for 61 years.

But something about this guy's tutorial convinces me that I can do it. Perhaps it's his frequent assertion (not in these words) that bagels are homely and ugly and perfectly happy being non-uniform. I'm a sucker for processes with built-in wiggle room!