Earlier this week I walked to a 9 a.m. meeting at work, bleary eyed, and was greeted outside of the conference room by several boxes of bagels. The bagels were from The Posh Bakery, a local chain with 14 locations around the Bay Area. The Posh Bakery is esteemed enough to have made at least one best Bay Area bagel list, so I knew I had to eat my bagel with a critical palate.
According The Posh Bakery’s website, “With over 15 years of bagel-making history, we've become an expert in the field.” As a card-carrying cynic and long-time bagel snob, I was naturally dubious of this claim. Although there were several varieties of Posh bagel and flavored cream cheese to choose from, I went with a classic everything bagel with regular cream cheese. The box also contained a standard selection of sesame seed, poppy seed, and plain bagels, along with the more esoteric blueberry, asiago, and asiago pesto.
An unnecessarily diverse array of Posh bagels.
A co-worker assured me that the asiago pesto bagel was "actually pretty good," but even as a long-time lover of pesto I find the idea of a pesto bagel off-putting at best and borderline unholy at worst—a bagel's beauty is in its simplicity.
The bagel was a good size, but lacked the blistered skin that marks a superior bagel. I smeared a generous layer of cream cheese onto my bagel and proceeded to photograph it from every angle, earning me some raised eyebrows from co-workers.
The Posh bagel was light and bread-like, lacking the satisfying chewiness of a True Bagel. It’s clear that this falls into the category of “bread with a hole in it pretending to be something more.” It’s the kind of bagel that I would consider eating again, but only if it was first toasted to Hell and back. Toasting is, after all, the “great bagel equalizer.”
This picture is depressing.
As described simply and eloquently by Ed Levine over a decade ago:
“A bagel is a round bread made of simple, elegant ingredients: high-gluten flour, salt, water, yeast and malt. Its dough is boiled, then baked, and the result should be a rich caramel color; it should not be pale and blond. A bagel should weigh four ounces or less and should make a slight cracking sound when you bite into it instead of a whoosh. A bagel should be eaten warm and, ideally, should be no more than four or five hours old when consumed. All else is not a bagel.”
The Posh Bakery bagel I ate sadly just wasn’t up to par.
I will spend my Fourth of July weekend seeking out new bagels to try—what is, in the end, more American than a bagel? Brought to America by Eastern European immigrants a hundred years ago and since raised to a staple and an art form, the humble bagel has achieved the long-dead American Dream.