Bagels at the Center
When she moved to Berlin in 2020, Alex Frons searched the city for bagels that tasted like the ones she grew up with in New York. Because she couldn’t find them, she set out to make them herself. That is how this New Yorker ended up bringing the flavors and texture of her childhood bagels to the German city.
In a now famous 2003 article from The New York Times, Ed Levine, food writer and New Yorker, defined it like this: “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.”
With a history of at least 600 years, if not more, the bagel is considered to have come from a Jewish community in Poland, one of the few places that didn’t forbid Jewish people from baking bread. Whatever the origin story, this round and satisfying (boiled and) baked bread has been associated with the Jewish community and even more so with the one in New York, where it became the breakfast and lunch staple of the city. The US bagel market is the largest in the world: total US sales for 2021, the last year with final stats, reached USD1.546bn, according to IRI research. Fresh bagel sales were up 12.1% from 2021, while packaged bagels showed less, but decent growth with a 4.3% increase.
New Yorkers have strong opinions – as exemplified in the opening quote – about what makes a good bagel and seem to be looking for one wherever they go, even in this gluten-free age. So is the case of Alex Frons, a New Yorker who moved to Berlin in 2020 and couldn’t find anything remotely similar to the bagels she grew up with. “And I figured I wouldn’t be the only one missing bagels,” Alex says today. “So, I thought it would be a good idea to start a bagel business. And I initially wanted to hire someone to do all of the baking for us and everything. I started it with a friend of mine who is also American, whom I knew from university, but who’s been living in Germany for like over 12 years. And he convinced me that no one would really know the type of bagel I wanted because they don’t do bagels here.”
That’s how Masha’s Bagels, a deli reminiscent of New York corner bagel shops, came up to be, in July 2021, by Treptower Park in Berlin. “We modeled it after a New York style delicatessen with bagels. In New York, you wouldn’t necessarily find a place like Masha’s where they do both like a bagel shop and do sort of a Jewish delicatessen things that we’re doing like matzo ball soup and Reuben’s and things like that. But we wanted to combine them to make it sort of a holistic New York experience.”
Finding the recipe for bagels had its challenges, and not only because Alex is, in her own words, “an amateur baker.” In theory, it couldn’t be simpler. “New York style bagels traditionally are quite pure in their ingredients,” explains the baker. “So it’s just basically the same ingredients you would find in bread, like flour, water, salt and yeast. And then they have the added ingredients of malt, either malt powder or malt syrup that gives them the distinct flavor and chew. And then all bagels are boiled before they’re baked, which also differentiates them from regular bread.”
But the flour in Germany is quite different from the one in North America: it’s a soft wheat flour and it has less protein than the one in the hard wheat flour traditionally used in the US. “That makes it a little bit challenging because there’s a lot more gluten in flour in the US and North America in general,” says Alex. “And gluten is the staple of bagels. So that was a little bit tricky. We used what we could find here that was as close as possible. But it was definitely the biggest challenge, I think, in replicating exactly what we wanted to do. We use pizza flour for that reason. And that’s been working pretty well for us.” Things got even trickier at the beginning of war in Ukraine, when they were affected by the flour shortage. They had to tweak the recipe to get the same results the clients expected. “But as long as we’re using a flour with a high protein content, it seems to work pretty well.”
You can read the rest of this article in the March-April issue ofEuropean Baker & Biscuit, which you can access by clicking here.