{"id":225,"date":"2009-12-02T14:29:57","date_gmt":"2009-12-02T18:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/?p=225"},"modified":"2009-12-02T14:29:57","modified_gmt":"2009-12-02T18:29:57","slug":"religious-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/2009\/12\/02\/religious-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Religious Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

From yesterday’s NY Times<\/a> comes the tale of an epic battle between Montreal bagels and New York bagels.<\/p>\n

Montreal\u2019s Bagels Square Off Against New York\u2019s<\/h3>\n
By\u00a0JENNIFER 8. LEE<\/a><\/address>\n
\n
\"Montreal-styleJennifer 8. Lee\/The New York Times<\/span>Montreal-style bagels, which are baked in wood-burning ovens, are generally sweeter and less plump than their New York cousins.<\/span><\/div>\n

Are\u00a0Montreal bagels<\/a> really better than New York bagels?<\/p>\n

City Room had been hearing about these legendary Montreal bagels\u00a0from our readers<\/a>. They were sweeter and less bloated. Since they were baked in a wood-burning oven, they had crisper crusts.<\/p>\n

So we decided to pay a visit to Montreal\u2019s bagel world to understand\u00a0the rival to our native bagels<\/a>. Montreal, which saw an influx of Jewish immigrants both before and after World War II, had become one of the main world centers of distinctive Jewish cuisine. Two Montreal bakeries stand out above all the others:\u00a0Fairmount Bagel<\/a> and\u00a0St.-Viateur\u2019s Bagel<\/a>, both in the Mile End neighborhood.<\/p>\n

What we found: Montreal bagel makers had no problem trash-talking New York bagels, which they found to be too gargantuan and too salty. \u201cWhy do they even call it a bagel?\u201d asked Andrew Gryn, a long-time employee of St.-Viateur\u2019s. \u201cIt\u2019s like having bread.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was speaking of H&H\u00a0bagels<\/a>, which he had tried when he was in New York. \u201cIt\u2019s grossly oversized for no reason,\u201d he sniffed. \u201cYou can\u2019t even have your mouth around it.\u201d (In fact, a comparison done in 2000 found that H&H bagels were about twice the weight of a St.-Viateur bagel.)<\/p>\n

City Room had to give it to the artisanal quality of the bagels being made at St.-Viateur. They are hand-rolled and baked in wood-burning ovens, something that current New York City regulations would no longer allow. The process gives them a crisp and smoky crust on the outside. The bakers slip tidy lines of bagels in and out on long wooden slats, before flipping them into a bin. Their recipe was slightly different, using malt flour, and they are boiled in water with honey. And since they are skinnier, the hole is more pronounced.<\/p>\n

And for some reason City Room could not understand, the preferred flavor of Montreal bagels is sesame. Bagel purveyors estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the bagels they sell are sesame flavored.<\/p>\n

Those at St.-Viateur said that their recipe was more pure to the Jewish version from Poland.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis recipe came right from Poland with the owner,\u201d said Gail Squires, a 25-year employee of St.-Viateur. \u201cYou go back to the original bagel from Poland. There\u2019s no salt. They\u2019re rolled by hand. Wood-burning oven. They weren\u2019t baking in the conventional ovens. They didn\u2019t have them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AtAndrew Gryn<\/span>At St.-Viateur\u2019s Bagel in Montreal, the bagels are baked in a wood-burning oven, then taken out out on narrow wooden slats.<\/span><\/div>\n

Montreal adherents proselytize the slight sweetness of their carbohydrate creation. \u201cOur bagel is a cross between a pastry and a bread: sweet enough to have by itself, and close enough with bread to have with something on it,\u201d Mr. Gryn said.<\/p>\n

But the lack of savory flavor is offensive to others. Mimi Sheraton, a former food writer and restaurant critic for The Times who also wrote a book tracingthe history of the bialy<\/a>, staunchly defended the New York bagel. She tried Montreal bagels last year when friends brought them back from Canada. \u201cI thought they were horrible,\u201d she said, because they \u201chad absolutely no salt but contained sugar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her conclusion: \u201cThey could not even be called bagels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, not all New Yorkers fell into the pro-New York bagel camp. Steven A. Shaw, a New York City food writer, did a comparison for the Montreal Gazette in 2000, which involved purchasing bagels in New York and Montreal at the same exact minute and then flying the Montreal bagels to New York for a side-by-side taste test. The Montreal bagels won hands down, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew York bagels have declined so much in my lifetime that it\u2019s hard to take them seriously anymore,\u201d he wrote in an e-mail message. \u201cNew York bagels used to be artisanal, too, as in made mostly by hand by people who knew what they were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Maria Balinska, who wrote a history of bagels published by Yale University Press last year called \u201cThe Bagel,\u201d\u00a0has a much more even-handed judgment<\/a> on City Room\u2019s blog. \u201cThe Montreal bagel isn\u2019t better than the well-made New York bagel \u2014 it\u2019s just different,\u201d she wrote. (Another City, London, is also known for its beigels.)<\/p>\n

So City Room brought a few dozen Montreal bagels back to share with co-workers to gauge their reactions, wondering if our co-workers would swoon over the Montreal newcomer or stay loyal to their native bagel.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it was a home-court advantage, but the New York bagel clearly won out among those who had an opinion to offer. The assessments of the Montreal bagel: \u201clike New York pretzels without salt,\u201d \u201ccompletely flavorless\u201d and \u201cdense, a little tough, and totally bland.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, Montreal bagels do have one claim to fame over the New York bagel. They\u00a0have been to space<\/a>. A Canadian astronaut took 18 Fairmount bagels up in a space shuttle last year.<\/p>\n

\"St-ViateurJennifer 8. Lee\/The New York Times<\/span>St.-Viateur Bagel in Montreal still uses wood-burning ovens to bake its bagels, which gives them a somewhat smoked flavor.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From yesterday’s NY Times comes the tale of an epic battle between Montreal bagels and New York bagels. Montreal\u2019s Bagels Square Off Against New York\u2019s By\u00a0JENNIFER 8. LEE Jennifer 8. Lee\/The New York TimesMontreal-style bagels, which are baked in wood-burning ovens, are generally sweeter and less plump than their New York cousins. Are\u00a0Montreal bagels really […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-montreal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dovweinstock.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}