A once-wise man once said there’s only one kind of bagel – plain.
That might have been the moment he started to lose his wisdom. As long as the dough’s good and the water’s better, you can put anything edible on or in a bagel and it’ll be excellent…. even fruit… I still sigh whenever I look in the freezer and see a blueberry’s the only one left, but once I bite into it I want to slap myself for putting it in the freezer in the first place.
But now, food scientist – and former chief tech officer at Microsoft – Nathan Myhrvold – has figured out how to get all the toppings on an everything bagel to stay on the bagel until you eat it. I almost don’t want to tell you more, for fear you’ll cringe, but it’s so simple that the beauty of it overrides the weirdness of it, so here it goes….. it’s tapioca starch and water. Ok, “modified” tapioca starch. But instead of keeping the modifications a secret, and thus necessitating a side trip to get a tin of “Dr. M’s Bagel Glue” every time you make a bagel run, Myhrvold has included the recipe in his new cookbook series “Modernist Bread”. If we in North Jersey had more pull with the Nobel committee, he’d be a shoe-in for the chemistry prize.
So I guess you could slather this stuff on and put whole chocolate bars instead of just chips on your bagel….. But please don’t tell me if you do that.
