How To Maximize the Bagel Experience

The eating of bagels was a strictly Jewish activity when I was a child. Nowadays it has come to be almost as American as apple pie. Over the years, I have come up with a few tips relating to bagels and the most traditional accompaniment to them, lox and cream cheese, which I feel are truly an improvement to the traditions I grew up with. Give these ideas a try, and I think you will be pleased.

Slice Your Bagels in Thirds

This is the most significant tip I’m stating in this article. Have you ever eaten a half-bagel slice and thought it was just too much bread for the amount of stuff you could pile onto it? I have felt this often. To rectify this, I have come up with a way to maximize the pleasure of eating bagels: by cutting them in three slices instead of the traditional two. This vastly improves the bread-to-toppings ratio, and greatly improves the bagel-eating experience.

Here is how to do that safely and efficiently.

1. Buy bagels that have not already been sliced.
2. Use a serrated bread knife and ALWAYS slice away from your hand and other body parts.
3. Hold the bagel on a cutting board so that the thinnest part is facing up. This is where the dough was joined into a circle in the bagel-making process. Although some bagels do not have this thinner side, most do.
4. Carefully slice down through the bagel so that you are removing the top third of the bagel.
5. Still holding the already-cut top slice to the bagel, slice the remaining two-thirds of the bagel evenly down the middle.
6. Store the bagels in the freezer in zipper-closing plastic bags. When putting the bagel slices into these bags, turn the slices just slightly so that they do not line up perfectly. This will make the frozen slices much easier to separate, allowing the removal of just the right number of slices from cold storage.
7. Toast the frozen bagel slices in a toaster or a toaster oven until just lightly browned. Over-browning will yield a dry bagel.

Keep Your Cream Cheese Clean

To keep your cream cheese from getting moldy before you’ve had the chance to use it up, never put anything into it except a totally clean knife. Open the tinfoil wrapping and remove the total amount of cream cheese that you want to use all at once, using a knife that is clean. Never go back for more cream cheese with the same knife that you’ve already used to spread or even deposit the cream cheese onto the bagel. This will contaminate the cream cheese and start the mold-growing process.

The Marriage of Lox and Cream Cheese

Lox (smoked salmon) and cream cheese on a bagel is an acquired taste. Most Jewish people who grew up with putting lox on bagels have long since acquired this taste, but many of the newer devotees to the bagel have not. If you wish to acquire this taste and find out what you've been missing, start by using just a small amount of lox on your cream cheesed bagel. Or, you can purchase cream cheese that has lox already blended into it, which would be another way to work up to the full lox-and-bagel experience.

Lox bought from a deli can be quite expensive. A more cost-effective way to buy lox is in bulk at the large discount stores like Sam’s or Costco. Here’s how I store and use these large packages most effectively.

1. Freeze in portions. Divide the pre-sliced fillet into five or six small portions. 
2. Put each portion into a snack-size zipper-closing plastic bag before freezing. 
3. Be sure to squeeze out all of the air while zippering the bags shut. 
4. Put all of the small plastic bags into one larger plastic bag. This helps to keep them organized in the freezer.
5. After removing one or more bags from the freezer, thaw at room temperature.
   
6. Then, store in the refrigerator by placing the plastic bag into a small glass bowl. This helps to keep the smoked fish odor from penetrating other foods or containers. Using Tupperware for this is not a good idea as the Tupperware plastic may permanently absorb the smoked fish odor.

My favorite bagel breakfast is two slices of bagel, cream cheese on both, with lox on one and orange marmalade on the other.

There you have it… a better bagel experience. Enjoy!