BATTLE HEATS UP OVER PLAN TO BAN WOOD-BURNING OVENS
■ of the city. The Montreal bagel has such a hold on the Canadian psyche that fears of its demise spurred a national outcry. “The Death of the Montreal Bagel?” asked a story last year in The Globe and Mail, a leading national newspaper.
Sarah Hanneman, who lives next to Fairmount, said the smoke from its oven was so bad she couldn’t bear opening her window in the summer and had trouble breathing. She stressed she has nothing against bagels.
“They should get rid of the wood-burning ovens and market their bagels as green bagels,” she said. “But every time the city suggests banning the ovens, people cry, ‘You can’t take away my bagels!’”
For the moment, the bagel war is at an impasse. City Hall is considering a regulation that would require businesses with wood-burning ovens to install purifiers. Fairmount Bagel said it had already done so, while St-Viateur has installed a filter in one of its seven locations.
But the authorities in the area have banned new businesses from installing such ovens, causing alarm that the art of Montreal bagel-making could disappear.
Royal following
Such is the pull of the Montreal bagel that a Japanese tourist once arrived in a limousine in front of Fairmount Bagel, holding a map with a line of dots leading from Osaka to the bagel shop. And St-Viateur once received an order for 20 dozen bagels for Prince Charles.
Morena thought it was a joke until a British naval officer arrived to pick them up.
Messing with the Montreal bagel would come at too high a price, said Bill Brownstein, a veteran columnist for The Montreal Gazette.
He noted that, in a province that recently passed a law banning teachers, judges and police from wearing religious symbols like turbans or skullcaps while at work, the bagel had become a secular symbol of civic pride. That, he added, was helped by its manifest superiority
Bagel is a doughnut-shaped yeast-leavened roll that is characterised by a crisp, shiny crust and a dense interior.
The bagel is commonly eaten as a breakfast food or snack, often with toppings such as cream cheese and lox (smoked salmon).
It is traditionally shaped by hand into the form of a ring from yeasted wheat dough, roughly hand-sized, that is first boiled for a short time in water and then baked.
The hole in the bagel allows it to cook faster, since there is a greater surface area for the volume of dough. It also means that you get more crust for the same amount of dough. And then there is the intrinsic attraction of the ring shape. to New York bagels. “New York bagels are like rolls with holes, they are tasteless,” he said. “Toronto’s are even worse, they taste like paperweights or hockey pucks. In the minds of Montrealers, every other bagel is ‘Meh’.”
Some New Yorkers retort that Montreal bagels are sweeter, and therefore more like doughnuts than bagels, a criticism that Lesley Chesterman, a leading Montreal food critic, called “absurd”.