Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 25, 1995 TAG: 9507250060
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Bagels are booming, powered by their low-fat appeal and the development of softer varieties more pleasing to the common palate. Dozens of local and regional chains now compete with supermarket stalwarts Lender's and Sara Lee, and all are bracing for the expected national rollout of fresh bagel shops backed by chicken roaster Boston Market Inc. and Starbucks Coffee Co.
``They're going to put these things up like there's no tomorrow,'' said Raj Chaudhry, editor of Chain Update, a food service industry newsletter based in the Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect.
Purists sneer at such offerings as jalapeno pepper bagels with salsa cream cheese, or red-white-and-blue star-shaped bagels, and also object to the puffy texture of some chain-store bagels.
``That's not a bagel,'' said Helmer Toro, owner of H&H Bagels, one of the biggest bagel bakers in New York, a city that knows from bagels.
He said traditional bagels are boiled before baking, which gives them a hard, shiny crust and a certain density - hence the nickname ``cement doughnuts.'' Many bagel chains use steam-injected ovens in a faster, cheaper process that produces softer bagels.
``They try to make a bagel out of a bread process. It's just taking dough and shaping it into a circle and they call it a bagel,'' Toro groused.
Great American Bagel President Wayne Flatley defended the steamed bagels his company produces.
``It still has a crust, but it doesn't give it that - I don't want to say rock-hard, because I don't want to knock anybody - it doesn't give it that hard finish,'' he said.
Still, many bagel chains want that New York panache. Consider Big Apple Bagels of Chicago, Noah's New York Bagels of San Francisco and Manhattan Bagel of Eatontown, N.J.
Jacobs Bros., a six-store chain in Chicago that hews to bagel-making tradition, plans to educate consumers by designing outlets so they can watch the bagels being boiled, said Phil Jacobs.
The nation's largest bagel chain, Bruegger's Bagel Bakery Corp. of Burlington, Vt., is another traditionalist. Steaming bagels ``produces a roll with a hole,'' Bruegger's president Stephen Finn said.
He also condemned the chemical preservatives that keep Lender's and Sara Lee fresh supermarket bagels soft and chewy for weeks. Nonpreserved bagels may turn hard overnight, but they're tasty toasted, Finn said.
Some mom-and-pop bagel shops feel threatened, though. Mitchell Cohen, a partner in family-owned New York Bagels, a 30-year-old institution in the Chicago area, is worried.
``I just hope it doesn't get too saturated,'' he said. ``If you have too many pieces of the pie, it's not enough for everybody.''
Cohen still boils his bagels, as did his father and uncle who started the business after moving from New York.
``Somebody that was born in the 1940s would like our bagel,'' he said. ``Somebody that doesn't know anything about a bagel doesn't know, so they're going to like the other kind.''
by CNB