San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F.style bagel? Believe it.
Bakers bring a local vibe with love & sourdough.
It’s never been easier to find a chewy, crusty bagel in the Bay Area, thanks to a slew of exciting new bagel popups that have joined growing shops like Boichik Bagels, Daily Driver and Wise Sons.
For many of these bakers, replicating a traditional New York bagel — a boiled and baked product that’s chewy and dense with a defined crust and underlying malty sweetness — in California has turned into the holy grail. But some of San Francisco’s newest bagel outfits are searching for something different — a San Franciscostyle bagel.
While they’re not necessarily claiming their bagel should be the benchmark for a new regional style, these bakers are imbuing their bagels with a little something extra that feels distinctly San Francisco. In the case of new Ferry Plaza Farmers Market stand Midnite Bagel, it’s a curiosity about different flours and grains akin to the city’s best artisan bakeries. For Bernal Heights popup Chicken Dog Bagels, it’s a sourdough base that gives the bagels a subtle tang while still providing the sturdy bagel texture East Coasters crave.
Alex Rogers, who launched Chicken Dog in June, grew up frequenting New York stalwart H&H Bagels and loved them. But there are so many bagels in New York that the quality inevitably varies. Despite this reality, many in the Bay Area pine after what the New York bagel has come to represent: the perfect bagel, which ultimately means different things to different people. “I think some people who grew up with New York bagels like pretty mediocre bagels,” said Rogers. “They’re not bad, but they’re not mindblowing. It’s fun to try to create something that’s a little mindblowing.”
One of these newfangled bagels started as a chase for the perfect bagel. Popup Schlok’s, which debuted at Pacific Heights bar the Snug in August, started after a partner at the bar, Zack Schwab, challenged his chef friend James Lok to create the best possible New Yorkstyle bagel in San Francisco.
Lok, who previously cooked at Michelinstarred destinations Benu and the Restaurant at Meadowood, started his journey by obsessively testing local ingredients with oldfashioned New York techniques: He rolled the bagels by hand, let them proof overnight, dropped them in boiling water and placed them on handmade wooden boards before baking.
But he didn’t have what he considered the ultimate siren song: potassium bromate, a food additive that East
Coast bagel shops are widely suspected to use. Combined with flour, it strengthens gluten to help dough rise more quickly and consistently in a cold environment, but any food that uses it must come with a cancer warning in California. It’s flatout banned in many countries, including Canada, Australia and the entire European Union.
His initial bagels were good, displaying the right resistance and an attractive sheen. Still, when he got his hands on bromated flour, the difference was palpable. In the oven, Lok noticed a more vertical spring as his bagels got taller, and the starches and sugars caramelized more rapidly to create a browner yet more delicate crust.
He loved it. But when he and Schwab started talking about potentially putting a cancer warning on their bagels, they concluded San Francisco residents care too much about ingredients to eat a carcinogenlaced bagel.
“Not to knock the New York bagel, but we realized it’s sort of like Wonder Bread. It’s very processed. It uses very cheap ingredients,” Schwab said of some of the bagels he’d tried while living in New York. “The Bay Area has to pave its own path of what the San Francisco bagel is going to be and not just be copying the New York bagel forever.”
With more time in the kitchen, and an adjustiment to the pH level of the water, Lok landed on a bagel that was almost identical to the one made with bromated flour, and it’s the bagel Schlok’s is proud to serve at its weekend popups. They’re hefty — twice the size of some other local bagels — and carry a stronger, maltier flavor with toppings placed on the bottom for crustier adhesion.
At Midnite Bagel, one key difference is a higher hydration dough, according to founder Nick Beitcher, who was most recently a bread baker at Tartine and left to fully focus on his bagel popup during the pandemic. His bagels taste more like a nuanced, spongey loaf you’d find at Tartine, but with a round shape and thin crust. Beitcher sources flour from Washington state’s Cairnspring Mills, incorporating rye into his basic dough for a nuttier flavor. He also experiments with other flours, like in a recent buckwheatblack sesame version.
Beitcher, who has family in New York City and lived in the city to work at fine dining temple Per Se, said though he likes New Yorkstyle bagels, it’s no longer what he wants to eat these days. He wanted to create the artisan bread bakery version of a bagel. “Most of the great artisan bakers in the Bay Area are focused on using natural fermentation and highquality flours from farmers who are really devoted to what they’re doing,” he said. “I’m taking those core principles and applying them to bagels.”
Chicken Dog’s bagels are also naturally leavened. Rogers, who’s also a pizza maker at Pizzahacker, has been baking bread for a dozen years and briefly ran a popular bagel popup, Shegetz Bagel, with friends in 2015 after learning some technique from Michelle Polzine at 20th Century Cafe. His bagels have morphed over time to reflect his own nostalgia, growing softer in the middle to counter the crispy crust.
“There’s trying to recreate some sort of memory but ultimately it’s creating something that looks good, tastes good and is fun to make,” he said. “I prefer the slow process — it’s like a conversation with the sourdough. It’s not always predictable and you’ve got to feel your way through it.”
But specific memories or perceptions of New York bagels do set up some impossible expectations for San Francisco bakers. Some customers at Schlok’s have wondered if the dough is whole wheat and actually complained of too much flavor, according to Schwab. Others have walked by Midnite Bagel's stand and scoffed just at the look of the breadier bagels, Beitcher said. Rogers, too, has heard strong opinions from customers at Chicken Dog. That intensity is part of why bakers are so passionate about creating their own style.
“I’m not into the whole nostalgia element of the New York bagel or deli genre. I just think there’s so much room to explore the food itself without all the trappings,” said Beitcher. “When bagels arrived in America, they didn’t look like our modern bagels, so I think what we accept as the universal bagel is really just one version of an infinite number of possible bagel versions.”
Meanwhile, Rogers is focused on getting faster at shaping — he currently churns out 225 bagels per popup on his own — so that he can open a bagel shop with relatively cheap prices. Bagels often cost $1.50 in New York but can top $3 in the Bay Area.
“In this city, in general, food takes on this precious quality. You can package a pretty basic product into something that looks absurdly visually appealing and charge $10,” he said. “I don’t want to be contributing to the luxury side of San Francisco.”
Funny, that’s a very New York way to think about bagels.
“Not to knock the New York bagel, but we realized it’s sort of like Wonder Bread. It’s very processed.” Zack Schwab, Schlok’s