1) Bagels are Outta this World 🚀
No kidding, they've been to space. In 2008, Astronaut Greg Chamitoff boarded Discovery for a 14-day flight around the Earth with 18 sesame bagels in tow, as part of his personal cargo allowance.
Now there's a man with taste!
2) World's Biggest Bagel 🌎
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the biggest bagel was 868 pounds. It required 1,100 pounds of dough, 900 gallons of water, and 10 hours to bake.
3) Boiled 'n Baked 🍯
Bagels are the only Western bread that is boiled before being baked. Authentic bagels are always dipped in boiling water for 4-5 minutes before going into the oven. This provides the authentic New York City bagel crust you love!
4) It's a Group Effort 🧑🤝🧑🧑🤝🧑
Bagel making was once a four-man job: Two people would make the dough, giving bagels their shape; one person boiled them, and the fourth person baked them.
5) Emoji Upgrade 🥯
Apple had to remake its bagel emoji in 2018 after people complained that the plain bagel had nothing on it. It was redesigned with cream cheese during the iOS 12.1 beta 4 cycle release.
Of course New Yorker fans may recall our enormously popular Campaign for a Bagel Emoji 8 years back, where we collected over 10,000 signatures on a petition to add a bagel emoji (it didn't exist), and submitted it to Unicode Technical Committee (UTC). Is that wht finally got the bagel added to our phones? We like to think so.
6) Stack 'Em High 📏
It's widely believed that bagels had holes to enable them to be stackable on a wooden poles, for easy transport and selling. Today we have FedEx and UPS, enabling ou to get your New York City bagel supply nearly anywhere in the USA!
7) Bagel Illuminati ✨✨
The bagel-making process was once a trade secret controlled by the Beigel Bakers Union which only admitted sons of existing members into the union and conducted its meetings almost entirely in Yiddish. Though modernized, our NY bagel baking process came from a recipe well over 100 years old.