The Montréal bagel: what it is, how to order it, what to avoid

Overview

A Montréal bagel is a different object from the one that word conjures elsewhere, and the differences are all deliberate. It is hand-rolled, smaller and thinner than its cousins, with a wide open hole that leaves little middle and a lot of crust. The dough is enriched with egg and malt and carries no salt; before baking, each ring is poached in water sweetened with honey, which is why the finished bagel is faintly sweet and takes on a glossy, lacquered surface. Then it goes into a wood-fired oven, on a long plank, and comes out blistered and unevenly browned, chewy inside and crisp-shelled, with a whisper of woodsmoke. The result is denser and sweeter than the fluffy, salt-and-water bread you may be expecting, and it is closer to a hand-made roll than to a supermarket bagel.

It is genuinely of this city — a food the Jewish immigrants who settled here in the early twentieth century brought from the old bakeries of Poland and adapted, and it has been made the same way, in the same corner of the city, ever since. Two round-the-clock bakeries a few streets apart in the Mile End and Plateau districts are the spiritual home of the thing, and the rivalry between their partisans is a genuine local sport; take no side and try both.

Who baked the first one, and exactly when, is the kind of question that has several confident answers and no settled one. The stories name individual bakers and dates in the years around a century ago, and they do not agree. Enjoy them as folklore. What is not in dispute is the method — hand-rolled, honey-boiled, wood-fired — and the method is the definition.

What to order

The two that matter are the seeds. Sesame — locally the white seed — is the icon, and the one to eat first; poppy seed, the black seed, is the other classic and the marginally denser, earthier choice. A good bakery sells both from open baskets, still warm, and will sell you one, a half-dozen or a dozen with no ceremony. Ordering a single warm sesame straight from the basket is the correct first move, and it costs almost nothing.

The one instruction worth giving is about freshness, not flavour. A Montréal bagel is at its peak in the first hour and stales faster than a bread with more crumb, so buy it warm and eat it soon. If a basket has just come off the plank, that is the batch you want; the person at the counter will tell you which one is freshest if you ask, because they are proud of it.

Eaten plain and warm it needs nothing. The traditional dressing is cream cheese, and the celebratory version adds smoked salmon and thin-sliced onion — this is a weekend-breakfast assembly, not a daily habit. Note that the bagel here is a thing you eat fresh, not a vehicle you toast and load: the crust is already crisp and the point is the bread, so a bakery will usually hand it to you untoasted and that is correct.

What to avoid

The failure to watch for is a bagel that has borrowed the name and none of the method.

The words “Montréal style” on a soft, thick, uniform ring are the tell. A real one is thinner, chewier, unevenly coloured from a live fire, and never perfectly round; a big, pale, pillowy bagel with a small hole is the other city’s style wearing this one’s name. A packaged version from a chilled shelf, however it is branded, has been neither boiled in honey nor near a wood oven, and it will taste of neither.

Look for the oven and the kettle. The genuine bakeries do their poaching and baking in full view — the flames, the plank, the water bath are the show, because they are the proof. A place selling “bagels” from a display case with no fire and no boiling water behind it is reselling, not baking, and the difference is exactly the honey water and the wood that make the thing what it is.

Be wary, too, of the bagel that arrives as a sandwich base in a café — split, toasted hard and stuffed. That is a fine breakfast and a poor introduction: it hides the crust, the smoke and the sweetness under fillings, which is the whole point sanded off. Meet the bagel first on its own, warm, from a bakery.

Practicalities

A single bagel runs somewhere around one to one-and-a-half Canadian dollars, and a dozen lands in the low- to mid-teens of dollars — this is a cheap food by design, and a price much above that usually signals a café mark-up rather than a better bagel. The famous bakeries take cards now, but the transaction is small and fast, so a couple of coins in your pocket keeps a single-bagel stop frictionless.

There is no meal it belongs to and no clock it keeps, which is the practical point: the landmark bakeries bake around the clock, so a warm bagel is available at three in the afternoon and three in the morning alike, and the quietest, freshest moment is often the small hours when a batch has just come off the plank and no queue has formed. On a cold day the warmth in your hands is half the pleasure.

Buy more than you think you want. A dozen keeps a day or two and the day-old ones are excellent split and toasted at home — the one time toasting is not a compromise but the sensible second life of a bread built to be eaten fresh.