A Morning in the Life of a Bagel Baker

I arrive to work at 4:45 am, unlock the door and disable the alarm. I make a beeline for the cash register to clock in, pausing at the light switches to turn them on.

Once I'm clocked in, the real work starts. I need to get the kettle going, but on the way there I turn on the oven: Fan, Heat, Power then the Green button to get the shelves rotating. At the Kettle, I open the gas valves to get the flame big, then drain or fill the water in the kettle to the proper level. The kettle is covered and left to heat up - a watched kettle never boils.

I flip the exhaust and fan switches on, then into the Walk In fridge, bringing in a rack for the bagels.

First, I will make order from the chaos of bagels, if it needs to be done. De-fan the racks, move boards around, simplify things.

Next, it's time to rack up the morning bake. This is the order:

  1. Bialy

  2. Salt(white)

  3. Sesame(white)

  4. Multi

  5. Garlic(white)

  6. Cinnamon/Blue

  7. Poppy(white)

  8. Plain(white)

  9. Everything(white)

  10. Sourdough/Pumpernickel

  11. Onion(white)

  12. Wheat

  13. Everything(white)

  14. Sourdough/Pumpernickel

  15. Sesame(white)

  16. Cinnamon/Blue

  17. Poppy(white)

  18. Plain(white)

Lots of bagels have the same (white) dough base. I rack those up first, then fill in the gaps with all the colored dough.

Once I'm done in the Walk in, I prepare the oven space for the morning bake. I set up for salt bagel, unstack and hose off the planks and seed them for the first racks.

With my remaining time I do whatever is needed - fill seed buckets, make Everything seasoning, clean wholesale sheets and dust boards.

Around 5:20 I'll check the water status in the kettle - earlier if I see steam billowing. Ideally the water is at a rolling boil, but as long as there are decent bubbles rising by 5:25, that's as late as I would want to start. Finally, time to start the morning bake.

The morning bake is exercise. It is cardio and muscle work at the same time. But more than that, it is a dance.

For over 45 minutes I stand at the oven, working fast and hard to put out the best possible bagels. It is tiring work, but when the bagels start coming out, looking good, it's all worth it.

First salt bagels. I dump the white dough into the kettle, scoop the bagels out of the hot water and dump them again, this time onto the wooden planks in the middle of the oven workspace.

I place the bagels in a 3 by 4 grid on the two metal pans and then sprinkle salt over them.

Next, Multigrain. I dump the dough into the kettle, scoop it out and onto the planks in the middle of the workspace. I place the bagels upside-down, six to a plank, on each of the four planks I pre-seeded.

If the middle area has oats from the Multigrain bagels on it, a quick rinse with the hose. Then, onto the Sesame bagels. Dump, scoop, dump, place on the other side from the Multigrain bagels.

Stop the oven on shelf 1. Open oven door (door is heavy, must be opened and closed dozens of times during bake) Put in the Salt pans. Rotate to Shelf 2. Put in Multigrain and Sesame planks. Keep oven rotating.

Unstack second set of planks. Rinse. Seed garlic. By now, oven is back to shelf 1, so stop oven and put in Bialys.

Dump,scoop,dump,place Cin/Blue. Repeat for garlic. When oven gets back to shelf 3, two rotations after the Sesame/Multigrain went in, stop the oven and put in Cin/Blue and Garlic planks. Return to shelf 2, and flip the Sesame/Multigrain off the planks. Move fast, it's hot in there. Keep oven rotating.

Rinse of planks. for for Poppy and Plain, and shelf 4 instead of 3 and 3 instead of 2.

And again for Everything and pump/sour, and shelf 5 instead of 4 and 4 instead of 3.

Around now, it's time to start checking shelf 1 for doneness. Right around the time shelf 5 is loaded with its bagels, shelf 1 will be ready. Bialys look good, stop the oven and using the big wooded peel, take them out front and dump in the appropriate bucket. Salt bagels may need to go around the oven one more time, and when they are ready they are removed from the oven, still in their pans, and set behind the baking area to cool off before taking out front.

Meanwhile I set up the Onion and Wheat bagels, and two rotations after putting in the second set of Everything and Sour/Pump the Onion and Wheat go into the oven. From now until the end of the morning bake, I frequently check the bagels doneness, shelf by shelf. Bagels should be nicely colored, but not too dark.

Sesame and Cin/Blue go in next, around the same time I remove from the oven their counterparts I had put in the oven 15 minutes prior. Plain and Garlic come out shortly after, right around the time the final boards of the morning bake, Plain and Poppy, go into the oven. At this point, the oven is full of bagels, and we have filled up all 5 shelves once, and 4 more shelves the second time around.

Now things settle down- All the bagels are in the oven so I just need to flip the final bagels off their planks, keep an eye on the bagels as they near doneness, take them out front when ready and clean up my workspace. At around 6:10, the bagels are all out of the oven, and the morning bake is done.

The last main part of being a baker is rolling the dough. In giant mixers, we mix huge amounts of dough. A double of white dough, a normal amount to roll at one time, is over 300 pounds of dough, including more than a pound of yeast! Only 5 ingredients in the white dough, very simple.

We load ingredients into a mixer, hose in water, and start. Generally, we start with the lighter doughs and work our way darker as to prevent stains. Once the mixer is done (10 minutes) we carry the dough to the table, in large heaps. This carrying of dough is among my favorite parts of this job.

If we need to roll bialys, that’s what we start with. Bialys are a little different from the regular bagels. The dough is mixed, the bialys are cut to size by hand, then rolled into dense balls. Finally, they are stretched to shape (Peter does most of this) and dipped into poppy/onion seasoning. Once they are all made, straight into the walk-in, no proofing necessary.

For regular bagels, once we get the dough on the table, we start rolling. One person cuts dough into approx. 2" by 2" by however long possible logs, feeding them into the top of the machine. The machine first weighs and cuts out pieces, then the pieces are passed along a conveyor belt through a tube-rolling segment where they are shaped. Finally the other baker catches the bagels and places them onto boards, placed in a 4 by 6 grid. Bakers+machine produce around 1 bagel a second, for 10 minutes.

We roll bagels non-stop, only pausing to start new batches in the mixers, reload the boards, bring dough to the table and move full racks to the kettle so bagels can proof.

We roll dough depending on what we are going to need in the next few days. The least dough I've rolled in one day is 30 lbs. One day, we rolled over 1,000 lbs of dough.

Once all the dough is rolled and proofing, all that remains is to flip the boards and rotate the rack an hour after they were rolled, and then keep an eye on them until they are proofed, roll them into the walk in, and fan them out so they cool off and don't overproof.

And occasionally, bake more bagels for out front.

Yaniv RaitComment