OVERVIEW
I did a little research to prepare for the Minnesota leg of the bagel quest. I learned that the first Jewish community of Minnesota was settled  in St. Paul in 1856 and by 1900 about five thousand Jewish people lived in Minneapolis.  The earliest mention of bagel I could find was in 1922 in the Twin Cities' American Jewish World  newspaper where it was announced that bagels and kugel would be sold at a fundraising bazaar. So odds are good that bagels had been around for awhile in the early years of the 20th Century.
  
Skimming through the  digital archives of the Jewish World News it was clear that in the 1960s and 1970s there was a robust bagel scene in the Twin Cities and the bagel shops (or at least the ads and articles) were recognizably Jewish. 

When I looked to see what bagel shops I should visit in 2024, there is not a lot of places to buy a not-mass-produced bagel.  My Google search for Minneapolis bagels led me to a 2010 article titled, "Twin Cities Bagel Roundup" by Heavy Table, which appears to be a much respected local food magazine. They tasted bagels from three local bagel shops and from the national chain Brueggers and declared Brueggers to be the winning bagel. Unless the writer was on the payroll for big bagel, this did not bode well for what bagels I would find. I wondered what happened to all the popular bagel shops that were in the Twin cities in the 1960s and 1970s.  And more importantly, I wondered if the bagel situation was any better in 2024.
 
So Jenny and I drove to Minneapolis to see about a bagel. 

Between reading the "best of bagel" blogs and recommendations by Jewish people living in the Twin Cities, I selected four bagel shops to visit. I contacted each of the owners and three of them were in town  to talk with me about how they make their bagels. 
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​My bagel  shop specific commentary is below, but there were some common themes in these four bagel shops. First, all these shops are fairly new...and by that I mean these are  first generation bakeries. They opened in 2007, 2014, 2018, and 2023.  Second, all three of the bakers I talked to got their start selling bagels at a farmers market. Third, each of the bagels I tasted cleared the not insignificant hurdle of my considering them worthy of the bagel name. These were not mass produced bagels. For the three bagel bakers I talked with, they all made their dough from scratch and use some version of traditional NYC bagel making production techniques. Fourth, the bagels all have seeds on the top, bottom, and in some cases on every inch of the bagel.

Proving my high school self wrong,  there is always a reason to understand basic science. That has certainly been true for me as I try to understand how exactly a great bagel is made and what distinguishes it from an average one. Chemistry is involved.  Learning about microbes is involved. Casually saying 'cold fermentation' is involved.  
 
I have read many things that can get a bit technical on the science front, but here are some essential facts. How much flour you knead into the dough matters. Refrigerating the bagels for at least 24 hours is key to slow down the yeast to make the flavors more complex and flavorful.  Boiling the  bagels to set the crust before it goes into the oven is essential. And it needs to be a quick in and out of the water because it is the brief boil that gets that perfect thin crisp crust.  Without these you are eating round bread and not a bagel.  
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Now I get that bagels are an assimilated food and every baker and eater gets to do what they want to do with a bagel. But if your goal is to make a traditional bagel, then that bagel should come out of the oven fully actualized - it should not need to be toasted upon arrival. I think the writing was on the wall when I found all these 1970s bagel ads in the American Jewish World  newspaper, because for three-quarters of the bagel shops I visited, the bagels could use some time in the toaster. 

Rise Bagel Co: 
Rise is in a really cool space, located in what looked to me like an old warehouse in an area that was once nicknamed the "Milling Capital of the World." The place was bustling with customers, I could see bagels being made and I really enjoyed talking to Kate, the owner. You can see from her T-shirt that she is interested in making a Minneapolis style bagel - which I can appreciate. She has taken what she likes best from the New York style and the Montreal style to make her own bagel. The Rise bagel technique includes boiling the bagels in malt barley syrup, cold fermentation for two days to get the right flavor and are baked in a traditional oven, so I was optimistic when we gathered in the car to taste the bagels. 
Would I walk half a mile out of my way to eat a Rise bagel: MAYBE. I would happily eat this bagel if given to me. The interior texture hit the exact right level of chewy yet not doughy. You can hear in the audio that we all liked the chewiness. It was a flavorful bagel. The exterior certainly had some crispness to it, but not enough to my taste. If I was picking a 'best in show' of the Minneapolis bagels I would pick Rise. It hit all the right notes. But the reason I would walk out of my way to get a bagel is because I have a hankering for one and I want to eat it as I walk out of the door. No toasting,  just hot out of the bag. 
​Would I buy a dozen bagels for a bagel spread: YES!   I would have cookie sheets waiting in a warm oven, crisp the bagels up a bit and serve them as part of a bagel spread in full confidence that the bagels would be enjoyed.   

Mogi Bagels: 
The Minneapolis bagel most recommended to me, in a word of mouth, friends of friends of friends kind of way, was Mogi Bagels. Megan has been making them for two years. So we went to the Northside Farmers Market to try some. I love her bagel maker origin story. She is a big bagel fan and wanted to remedy the fact that Minneapolis has a shortage of of artisan bagel shops...so she decided to make some. So how did she learn how to make bagels?  By following Reddit threads and watching YouTube videos to find recipes and learn the authentic NY way.  I know it is a generational divide that I find this research approach both creative and slightly horrifying.  What if you are crowdsourcing bagel expertise from the wrong crowd? These bagel were delicious. I don't know if using barley malt powder as opposed to barley malt syrup was the reason, but the flavor was top notch. They had a nice chewiness. But the exterior texture was disappointing,  there was no crisp crust to the bagel. This could be easily remedied with a toaster, which we all agreed was needed.
Would I walk half a mile out of my way to eat a Mogi Bagel bagel: NO. I am not walking out of my way for a bagel, even as flavorful as this one, that lacks a distinctive crisp crust. There is no satisfying bite when I pull the bagel out of the bag.
Would I buy a dozen bagels for a bagel spread: YES!!! This is an exceptionally tasty bagels and I have a toaster at home. ​

After visiting the four bagel shops, Jenny made the observation that the further into this quest we get....the less Jewish the bagel is seeming. I know that  while us Jews have kept a tight grip on the bagel, it is fully an American food. And a great bagel is a great bagel and it doesn't matter who makes it. But it is interesting that there does not seem to be, or at least I haven' t found, a Jewish-owned bagel shop or much Jewish baker history in the Twin Cities.  My daughter Tamar recently moved to Minneapolis and she joined us on this leg of the quest. She shared her thoughts on being a Midwest born Jewish bagel eater with a mother who has lectured her for her whole life on what constitutes a great bagel.

The bagel quest is heading to the Twin Cities this weekend.  I know next to nothing about Minneapolis and St. Paul and my Google research on its bagel bakery and Jewish history wasn't getting me anywhere interesting. So I got in touch with Kate Dietrick, an archivist at the Upper Midwest Jewish Archives. If she had just replied to my random email query by saying, "This is by far my favorite reference question in a long while," dayenu. But she also sent me the link to a 'bagel' search in the digitized copies of the American Jewish World newspaper. The newspaper was published from 1915 to 2007, and we found 996 bagel entries throughout its 92 years.

Skimming through close to a century of this newspaper, I saw the tagline change over time from "A Weekly Journal of Modern Jewish Labors" in 1922 to "A Weekly Journal Devoted to Jewish Interest" in 1950 to "Voice of Minnesota Jewry" in 1987.  American Jewish World consistently covered the Jewish news and events it believed to be of interest to Jews living in the Twin Cities. 
 Gaza 
The bagels: The first bagel entry was in 1922 as part of the publicity for a fundraising bazaar: "...bagel, strudel and other Jewish delicacies will be sold." Next we hear of the bagel is at the 1928 annual food bazaar of the Women's League of the Adath Yeshurun synagogue and that Mrs. Zalkind will be bringing the strudel and bagels.  Bagels were mentioned as the food of choice in countless gatherings and meetings, were mentioned in classified dating ad profiles, and were used as a reference point in reflections on the general state of Judaism. There  were almost no articles about the bagel bakeries themselves and no real commentary on the bagel situation in the Twin Cities. Since most of the entries were ads for bakeries that sold bagels, I could see that many places sold real bagels, but I couldn't learn much about those places. Even with a Google search. But the ads were a delight and definitely revealed a great deal about how Minnesotans understood the bagel. If these ads tell the full story, the Twin Cities had the most bagel shops in the 1960s and 1970s and used very different bagel selling points than I have seen in other cities.​

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First, let me just say that I appreciate when Jewish folks use 'bagel' as a shorthand to describe ourselves.  The Bagel Squadron (1949) is the perfect name for Jewish aviators who want to fly to La Crosse, WI to spend an afternoon fishing. There was also a Bagel Club, formed in 1947 for WWII aviators, which isn't quite as good a name.  I am pretty sure that after eating great bagels, one of the reasons for this quest  is to chip away at my Jewish NY-centric orientation. I have lived in Wisconsin for 28 years, my daughter just moved to Minneapolis...it is time. Learning that there were enough Jewish pilots in the Twin Cities in the late 1940s to start several flying clubs did its part to erode some of this geographic snobbery.

Leah W. Leonard's regular column, 'Foods to Remember' was a delight to read. One of my favorite features was the food travel story letters people wrote to her. This one was a bit of a mind bender for my born and raised in NY brain.  Mrs. Lee Gross of Iowa drove to Omaha and stopped to buy some bagels.  Then she gave some to the Minister in her town for his family and they loved them so much they wanted the recipe. So she wrote Leah Leonard and begged her to print a bagel recipe in her column, which Leah promised to do as soon as she could figure out how to scale down the bagel recipe she got from a commercial baker in St. Louis.  There are so many surprising elements in this column for me, and at the top of my list is that in 1949 Omaha was a bagel destination...at least for Jewish folks in Iowa. I might need to visit Omaha and see what bagels I find there. 

In 1960, the New York Times described the bagel as "an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis", for its readers that didn't yet know what bagels were.  In the Twin Cities, The North Side Bakery opened in 1961 and their ad campaign through much of the 1960s portrayed the rigor mortis aspect as a selling point. 'HARD BAGELS' featured prominently in the ad copy.  

​Bagelville opened in 1970 at the Texa Tonka Shopping Center and I think lasted only until 1972. (This shopping center seemed to be a natural habitat for bagels since "The Bagel" who had its grand opening as the Twin Cities newest Jewish Bakery in 1964 was located there from 1964-1966.) Bagelville had some amazing and kinda bewildering ads during their time. Each ads touts the fact that they are water bagels - which as far as I can tell just means they are boiled in water - which is basically a defining characteristic of a well-made bagel. They were very serious about mentioning how low calorie the bagels were, but then most of the ads have recipes similar to this Bagel French Toast recipe.  

The Lincoln Del was a popular Jewish Deli that opened in 1935 in N. Minneapolis. I learned about them because for a period of time in the late 1960s and early 1970s they created a lot of bagel ads -- ads that go against everything that defines a self respecting NY-style bagel. I think it is safe to say that traditionally a NY bagel is not toasted. My theory on why New Yorkers are strident on this bagel point of pride is because it there are so many bagel shops. If you want a great bagel all you need to do is walk a few blocks and you are standing in front of a store that has hot out of the oven bagels. If they are made correctly with a crispy exterior, there is no need to toast them. Now you might want to toast them if you are eating them the next day, but in NYC the need to toast a bagel is the opposite of a bagel selling point.

When I first appointed myself to this bagel quest, a colleague of mine, a 30something Jewish Madisonian told me his favorite place to get bagels in Madison. When I questioned how he could think this bagel shop had good bagels, he said that New York Jews don't get to define what is Jewish. I agreed with his point, but I said that we do get to define what is a good bagel. I mean bagels originated in the U.S. when Polish Jewish immigrants brought them NYC.  This was before food could be mass produced and by 1900 the Lower East Side of NY had 70 bagel bakeries. To make the NY-style bagel you needed four bakers: a 'mixer' to form the dough, a 'shaper' to roll the dough and form by hand into a round with a hole, a 'boiler' to give the dough a bath in malt water, and the 'baker.'

While I understand that a case can be made for the toasted bagel, that you can't buy fresh out of the oven bagels in every city and a toaster might be required to get back the crispy exterior, there is no case to be made for a bagel without a hole. 

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 I have always struggled with the idea that being Jewish requires me to be a Zionist. I started this bagel quest in January, at a time where Zionism and anti-Semitism are volatile, and I have worried that it was frivolous for me to be off on my Jewish cultural connection quest. I thought about this a lot while reading through American Jewish World newspaper.  After noticing how stridently Zionist the articles were I Googled the newspaper and learned that one of the goals of the paper was to promote Zionism and unite Minnesota Jews behind the cause. The articles told one story and the ads told another. I'm going to end this Twin Cities bagel history piece with one of the kinda odd and kinda funny Israel current events bagel ads that 'New York Bakery and Bagels' placed in the paper in the early 1990s. 


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