Chew On This: The Science Of Great NYC Bagels (It’s Not The Water)
One of the first life lessons I picked up in college was this: The secret to the shiny crust and chewy bite prized in New York bagels is boiling. Any other way of cooking them, my Brooklyn born-and-raised, freshman-year roommate told me, is simply unacceptable.
Leo Rosten famously noted in The Joys of Yiddish (1968) that bagels are mentioned around 1610, in Jewish community rules (takónes) from Krakow but he oversimplified a bit when he reported that “bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth”.