Scooping in the Grove. Paul Goldfinger photo on Mt. Hermon Way. 3/10/25. . Use the small tong to do the scoop.
Paul Goldfinger, Editor Blogfinger.net
Currently I like the kind of bagels that have coatings, especially onion and garlic. I grew up in a home where the more details in food, the better, so we ate chicken organs, lung, kidneys, onions, garlic, sardines and chicken fat. Oddly though I avoid “everything” bagels because there is a confusion of flavors there, and the bakers often put salt on top, which I don’t like. But you can pick off those bright white bits by hand.
One time I was fixing a bagel at Wegmans near the toaster, but then I was liking un-toasted bagels. A man came over to the toaster and said to me, “The only way to eat a bagel is to toast it.”
Well my choices have changed these days. There’s nothing like a well done toasted onion or garlic bagel. But there is a caveat. If you over-toast a garlic bagel, the kind with bits of garlic on the surface, you might burn the garlic, and that ruins the taste. I tried to find out how to find perfection in a toasted garlic bagel, but it varies with the baker as to how those bits get stuck to the surface.
So I interviewed a bagel chef at “Bagel Talk” in the West Grove mall just outside the OG gates. Ian first told me how to scoop a bagel. I always scoop bagels because it helps make the outer crust crunchy—the best. You can see in the photo that Ian uses a small tong to scoop out the puffy interior. I used to do it with my fingers, but the Ian method is better. When I was a practicing doctor I would say, “Stick out your tongue.”. But now I seldom say that, and I’m using the tongs regularly.
And he told me a secret: when toasting a garlic bagel, you have to “walk a fine line” to get the bits of garlic just right without burning those bits and thus ruining the result. So now, when I go there and have him prepare a toasted garlic bagel, I remind him to “walk that fine line.” And I watched him, and some bit of toasted garlic fall off. So he scoops those bits and then sprinkles them on the surface after the schmear with cream cheese or butter.
Oh, I guess it’s obvious that a scooped bagel has less calories. But a generous schmear will double the calorie count.
So this is part of my next book: Bagelopathy secrets: Walking a fine line at Bagel Talk. But there is an irony here: The founders of Ocean Grove, including Stokes and Osborne probably never ate a bagel in their lives, but “Oh! …look at me now.”
FRANK SINATRA.