When I lived in New York, there was nothing more satisfying than a freshly toasted bagel: sliced and filled with cream cheese, smoked salmon, capers and thinly sliced red onion, then wrapped in parchment paper and sliced in half to be eaten like a sandwich.
In Australia, I’ve enjoyed incredible sourdough loaves, satisfying freshly made gözleme on Melbourne’s Smith Street and the insanely fluffy focaccia at Hope St Radio. But none of it quite made up for the paucity of decent bagels – or the plenty of disappointing ones.
“There is a serious lack of good and affordable bagels here,” says Annie Friedman, who moved to Adelaide from the east coast of the US two years ago.
Kristin Fox, another American living in Adelaide, agrees: “How can Aussies do bread [and] bakery items so incredibly well but not bagels? Does my head in.”
Fortunately, Australia is having a bagel renaissance, a direct upshot of the pandemic’s baking craze.
During a seven-year stint working in hospitality in Montreal, Sam Terrey, a Sydney baker, discovered the beauty of bagels. Whether they were covered in sesame or tout-garni (all-dressed, AKA “everything”), the city’s bagels were notable for being wood-fired.
“Montrealers would walk to the bagel shops and get a bag of fresh bagels, and either eat them plain or with some butter or cream cheese. Ideally when they’re fresh and hot out of the oven,” he says.
Determined to enjoy this daily ritual back in Australia, over time Terrey – a self-taught baker – decided on an approach that he knows would make bagel purists “recoil in horror”. At Small Talk in Sydney’s inner west, the circles of dough are not boiled, but instead briefly soaked in a mixture of barley malt and lye.
The former is a classic ingredient in bagels; the latter is an alkaline liquor traditionally derived from wood ash leached into water, commonly used in pretzel making. It creates a chemical reaction, heating the water to a high temperature without boiling, and also contributes to the “golden-brown crisp skin” – a bagel must-have.
Another unique aspect of Small Talk’s sourdough bagels is the significant percentage of rye flour used. A few years into his bagel experimentation, Terrey found using rye teamed up well with barley malt for an extra nutty flavour, though it “did make fermentation and shaping harder”.
These are definitely Sydney bagels, not Montreal ones: “Our biggest difference is we don’t wood fire,” says Terrey. “That’s really an economic choice. If I had the money and space to build a wood-fired baking oven I absolutely would.” Small Talk strives to offer toppings that match the quality of their bagels: house-smoked ora king salmon and house-brined pastrami are homages to the way “bagels tie in with deli culture”. They are also working on making their own cream cheese.
At the Saturday morning Carlton farmer’s market in Melbourne, one of the longest queues leads to Masses Bagels, where a small crew is hard at work slicing and toasting, spreading and topping.
Masses is the lovechild of chef Jack Muir-Rigby and coffee professional Carmen Newton. A few years ago, Muir-Rigby was feeling burnt out from his demanding kitchen job at wine bar Embla. He and Newton took off to Japan for an extended trip. It was in Hokkaido, in Japan’s far north, that the couple stumbled upon an unlikely source of inspiration: a freshly baked bagel.
It was enough to convince them to start their own bagel business back in Australia. In Melbourne, there were icons such as Glick’s, as well as notable newcomer Mile End Bagels – but the couple wanted to add theirs to the mix.
Armed with a dough starter (“I brought [it] over from New Zealand, dehydrated, on the plane,” says Muir-Rigby), his first bagels were made with yeast and he experimented with different flours, such as Italian double-zero. Trials led to a flour mix of 80% wholegrain baker’s flour and 20% high-protein flour from the organic miller-grower Woodstock for “stability”.
One particularly tasty Masses bagel is the polenta-thyme. Inspired by the cookbooks from San Francisco sourdough shop Tartine and a polenta loaf at Melbourne’s Wild Life bakery, where Masses Bagels are baked, it’s made by mixing fermented polenta, double-zero, as well as seasoned salt and thyme into the dough. Before baking, the bagel is dusted with polenta.
“Bagels fit into Australia’s sandwich trend, the brunch trend,” says Muir-Rigby. But the nation’s brunch scene is a crowded field, so, “maybe they get a bit lost in it”.
Years ago, Adelaide had a niche bagel scene, centred around the Jewish deli-inspired Flying Fig and the popular Frankly Bagels. But during the pandemic, chef Aaron Caporn threw his bagel into the ring.
Caporn worked at a cafe (formerly called Sibling, now Paddy Barry’s) where the bagels were popular with customers – but the baker who supplied them went out of business. In lockdown, with baking advice from fellow baker and former Sibling colleague Duncan Reid, Caporn tinkered with sourdough bagels, enjoying the slow process of feeding the starter, then spending a day mixing, proofing and shaping the bagels, then cold-proofing them overnight. On the third day, he’d boil and bake them.
Caporn didn’t know much about bagels when he started Holy Mother of Bagels, but through trial and error he determined how to achieve a glossy crust through proving. Coached by New York-based friends, Caporn learned enough to develop traditionalist opinions: “It has to have barley malt syrup [in both the dough and the water] to qualify as a bagel,” he says.
He also adds bicarb soda to make the water more alkaline, which helps break down the starch molecules and aids fermentation. Recently, Caporn added a small portion of scalded wholewheat flour for a softer bagel. I can confirm: the thing practically bounced on my teeth.
Now, Caporn is making 2,000 bagels a week, mostly for wholesale to cafes. They’re back on the menu at Paddy Barry’s, accompanied by eggs and bacon; at McLaren Vale’s Dawn Patrol, you’ll find them filled with hummus, dukkah and shiraz jam. Soon Caporn will open a new bakery in the Adelaide Hills, for wholesale and retail.
For Caporn, bagels are serious business. “It’s not white bread with a hole in it,” he says, with great earnestness. “That’s not what we’re after.”
