n January 2022 I embarked on an adventure into owning a bakery. I had always thought that the community of Pecos/Glorieta needed a place to get some donuts and coffee as they head to work, as there are not any places open before 8 am to get breakfast for everyone heading out into the world. I have lived in the community for 24 years and it was always in the back of my mind, I just didn’t know how to get started.

I’ve been working in the food industry since I was 14 years old, my first job was at a Drive-in in Washington state, complete with roller skates! When I moved to NM I supported myself by working at Pizza Hut and various positions at Red Lobster. When I moved out to Pecos I was a hostess at El Gancho where I remember I had to wear evening gowns and heels. For the last 20 years (off and on) I have been working as the manager for the local Dairy Queen. I ventured into other avenues, including getting certified as a Vet Tech, earning my bachelor's degree in Legal studies, and numerous other degrees in web design, graphic design, and photography. I worked other jobs but none ever lasted, the food industry kept pulling me back, clearly, my chosen paths were not the ones I was supposed to be on.

n 2021 New Mexico relaxed their strict Cottage Food Laws and passed new legislation allowing home bakers of all kinds to throw their doors open and come into the light of home foods.We all know the tamales we get in the trunk of the burrito ladies' honda civic, or the beef jerky we buy on the side of the road. Road stands of apples, fruits, and veggies have always been out there and are a way of life for many people.In the cooler months, we New Mexicans hunt down the pinion stands like they are gold and horde the tasty tree nuts to get us through the staggered seasons.

With the passing of this legislation, I saw my opening and decided to just dive in. No testing the waters, I dove right in and one thing I knew I wanted to make was bagels. How hard could bagels be? Turns out, very hard, very very hard.

Bagels have a rich history spanning six centuries. No one really agrees on who invented it first or when the bagel was first mentioned in written history, but it has withstood the ages and moved through being oppressed and even illegal, to it’s own union as it made its way across oceans to land in New York.

There is no one single recipe and no bagel will ever be the same as each artisan, yes, artisan, makes it different from another. I began with a book called Real bagels are boiled. A recipe book that offered some insight on boiling bagels, shaping, and baking, something I didn’t know, I didn’t even know pretzels were boiled first, it was all news to me. I didn’t have much experience, if any in baking bread, except making rolls here and there so this all seemed very involved, but I was up to the challenge and made it my goal to make an awesome bagel, little did I know that that one little recipe was not involved at all!

Like most anything I tend to dive into the deep end and then figure out how to swim. Are there better ways? Sure, but where is the fun in that?

No this turned into quite the adventure as I went from never making a bagel to a bagel connoisseur. I started with one recipe and announced to the community I was up and running and making bagels! I was quickly overwhelmed by Santa Fe’s absolute need for a good bagel. I had a LOT of failures and a lot of upset people, but I took ownership of my mistakes and promised to make it up to the community. I researched and studied and found other recipes with had more steps. So I dug out the flour, salt, and yeast, bought the malt syrup, and dove in again. Improvements were made, I sent them out and I got feedback and I kept on going.

I found other recipes, attended bagel classes I found online, watched videos, and read even more and kept on making those bagels and kept on selling them to the community and kept on absorbing that feedback. Soon I was digging into the history of bagels as I sought out better techniques, and better recipes and added things, or subtracted things to my growing adaptations of a simple recipe. I visited Bagelrys in other cities, toured kitchens that would let me and taste-tested other bagels. I talked to other bagel makers and sought out their advice and soaked it all in. Now I never asked for that coveted ‘secret’ Local 338 recipe, One never asks for another's' recipe as that is like asking someone for Abuela’s chile recipe, you don’t do it!

I could have stopped when I finally hit a stride of consistent positive feedback and been happy with having a good bagel, but when I do something, I am usually all in and I want to be the go-to for bagels, so I kept moving forward, I kept striving to hit the right path. I had ground to make up with the Santa Fe community for asking them to eat deflated cardboard discs!

Late in 2022 I stumbled across an online library, in my bagel research, that had history books, articles and newspapers scanned and available for checkout to read. On a whim, I searched for bagels and found a ton of articles about the Bagel Bakers Local 338 a union of bagel bakers in New York. This lead me down a rabbit hole of Bagel History along with finding some in-depth discussions on bagel-making which lead me to the mostly lovely woman 92 years of age!

This lovely woman was part of the Bagel Union and helped me develop a recipe suited for obstacles of New Mexico that closely resembles the most coveted New York Bagels, which turns out to be a 2-day in-depth hands-on fermenting/boiling/baking process.

Like I said, little did I know how truly involved and hard making a bagel was or how culturally important and significant a little piece of bread could be. New Yorkers are not just bagel snobs, bagels have meaning and history.

Bagels have a long history starting in the 14th century. In a book written by Maria Balinska (The Bagel: A surprising history of a modest bread) She suggests that they came East to Poland from Germany as part of a migration flow during the 14th century. At the time, pretzels were making their way out of their original home in the monasteries and being made into readily available feast day bread. German immigrants, brought to Poland brought the pretzels with them. In Poland, that theory goes, the German bread morphed into a round roll with a hole in the middle that came to be known in Poland as an obwarzanek. Written records of them appear as early as the 14th century.

Obwarzanek became better known when then Queen Jadwiga, opted to eat obwarzanek during Lent in lieu of the more richly flavored bread and pastries she usually enjoyed.

Other versions credit the invention of the bagel to a late 17th-century Viennese baker trying to pay tribute to the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski. The king had led Austria in driving back invading Turkish armies. Given the well-known love of horses King Jan had, the baker decided to shape his dough into a circle that looked like a stirrup -- or beugel in German.

As Germans and their pretzels made their way into Poland the Jewish population was also seeking asylum in Poland. The Jewish people were oppressed in many ways, including from baking bread! In that era, it was quite common in Poland for Jews to be prohibited from baking bread. It was a common belief that Jews, viewed as enemies of the Church, should be denied any bread at all because of the holy Christian connection between bread, Jesus, and the sacrament. Jews were often legally banned from commercial baking.

Though the Poles are citizens of their country rather than based on religion or ethics. This created an environment where Jews were allowed to bake, and then sell, bread. In 1264 Polish Prince Boleslaw the Pious declared "Jews may freely buy and sell and touch bread like Christians.”

Maria Balinska points out that "This was a radical step, so radical that (in reaction) in 1267 a group of Polish bishops forbade Christians to buy any foodstuffs from Jews, darkly hinting that they contained poison for the unsuspecting gentile." The theory goes, Jews were allowed to work with bread that was boiled, and they created the bagel to comply with his ruling.

The first written account of the Bagel was made in 1610 in community regulations of the Polish city of Krakow, which dictated that bagels were to be given as a gift to women after childbirth. In medieval Poland, their round shape led to the belief that bagels had mystical powers. Like the round loaves of challah eaten at Rosh Hashanah to symbolize a full and complete year to come, the round shape of the bagel was believed to bring good luck in childbirth and to symbolize long life.

Bagels are multi-cultural and have multi-ethnic origins in Poland, when they landed in the US they were associated with Jewish culture. Like other bread such as blintzes, latkes, pastrami, and rye bread, bagels came to be known as primarily Jewish.

Over the course of the 20th century, bagels followed the path of so many other foods that were"Jewish". They became softer and sweeter as they moved out of New York's Lower East Side into the middle of the country and into the mass market.

​I could continue on to say so much more about the bagel and its deep history but this blog post should be enough to whet your appetite. If you want to learn more check back as I will dive deeper into the bagel as it migrates to the US and through to today!

Baking Soda...It's such a versatile little alkali. You can use it for so many things.

Absorbing odors

Cleaning

Baking

In Making boiled bread (Pretzels, Bagels) you use it in your boiling liquid. Now if you are wanting to make TRUE bagels the old way you need to use lye, but lye is hard to find and needs special equipment, gloves, and goggles to use it safely, not many people want to use corrosive things to cook with so baking soda is the substitute and the extent the home cook does with it is pairing it with a neutralizing acid to make bubbles that leaven pancakes or baked goods.

Home cooks almost never use it as a flavoring. It’s a mineral, like most alkalis, and it tastes bitter and soapy.

Now as a bagel maker, can I call myself that now?

As a bagel maker, I am constantly learning and educating myself on techniques to develop the best bagels possible and sometimes I run across information in the most unlikely places. I recently read a recipe that called for baking my baking soda… What now? Baking my baking soda?

Yeah, turns out that is a thing and it’s a big thing that has some chemical magic behind it. I won’t bore you with the biology of chemical reactions and protons. Still, by baking your baking soda you have now created yourself a nice strong and evenly matched substitute to lye, while still, an irritant it isn’t corrosive and as dangerous to work with.

It also comes with a lot of culture behind it, taking its place in Asian cooking, Swedish cooking, and Italian cooking to just name a few.

Making bagels and pretzels as close to the old world styles is like climbing Mount Everest. I have read and prepared for many things, but there are always more surprises and failures. So here I am continuing to chase that as close to perfect bagel and learning yet another secret when I wasn’t even looking at Bagels.

Here’s to my Mount Everest and all the twists and turns it throws at me.