ny expert will tell you a bagel is at its finest when it’s still warm, though not piping hot, from the oven. This is true: The outside is now shining and crackling. There is a barely sweet, pleasingly chewy quality to the bread inside. After a couple of hours, there will be a discernible shift, a deterioration in both spring and crunch. The bagel is not stale, but some of the spirit has gone out of it. It will now benefit greatly from toasting.
In other words, the life of a bagel is short. So move quickly when you hear Melissa Weller and her crew shouting two of the sweetest words in the English language, “hot bagels!” This happens every 20 minutes during the morning rush hour at Sadelle’s, the bakery Weller opened two weeks ago in Soho. The bagels are glossy and chewy and crisp, all at once—glittering with salt, bulging with onions, freckled with poppy seeds. For now, 1,200 are turned out each day.
