- New York, I believe has two, special things,
better than any other state, in the Union.
And that's pizza, and bagels.
Some people will question me every once in a while.
"Oh, you've changed the bagel or you've done."
We have not changed one iota of,
what goes in our bagel, the oven, the kettle,
everything is the same for 40 years here.
There are weeks where I can bake a hundred thousand bagels,
but on average,
I would say we do about 70,000 bagels a week.
This is a mountain,
(Scott laughing)
a mountain of our flour.
A week we'll probably go through over 200 bags.
And again, if I don't have flour, I'm not business.
This is an incredible machine,
it mixes up to 200 pounds of flour.
We use an enzyme called a bagel improver,
help for your digestion,
and it also softens the bread inside.
We don't spare expense, when it comes to quality.
One of the main differences about our ingredients,
is we use liquid malt.
Old school way, old school flavor, liquid malt.
And we're just mixing water in there,
and New York water, that's how they say it, New York water.
If water was the main thing that happens to a bagel,
that makes it great.
There's about five bagel stores,
that are around my store here.
They would make as good a bagel as we make.
It's what you do with the water,
it's how much water you put in it, how much when you proof,
you let go in the air.
Those are the things that aren't talked enough,
about the water.
It's those techniques, that make our bagel what they are.
Now, we're gonna add the flour,
now those are 50 pound bag, in Henry's day,
he used to have to carry a hundred pound bag.
(Scott laughing)
Salt, the amount of yeast you add, is important.
Because at different times of the year,
the weather or the atmosphere,
the humidity, will control how fast the bagel will rise.
These guys have been doing this for 20, 25 years,
and they know what they're doing.
But you see the batch that comes out of here, it's crazy.
We'll make about a thousand bagels at a time.
The process of the mixing
will probably take, 20 to 25 minutes.
We'll take it out and put it on a rolling table,
we put a wrapper over it, so it continues the proofing.
It makes the bagel rise a little bit.
It'll soften it also,
so that it becomes a little bit easier to roll.
The roller will come back and start cutting his bagels,
and start forming them,
and rolling them into individual bagels.
The biggest difference I think, with all my rollers,
how they lock their bagels.
And a good lock is like you can't even find
where it happened.
You're talking with, literally a master,
I would call Henry a master.
But he's been rolling bagels, over 27 years.
From each roller, you could find that lock
and I can tell, "Oh, wow, that's Henry's bagel,
that's Daniel's bagel, that's Raffi bagel."
By the way, they lock their bagels.
When it's machine made, there's a cylinder
that just keeps pumping it, and pumping it, and pumping it.
And that tightens that dough up,
it's the rolling, is really what keeps it soft.
And rollers are a dying breed.
It's not like there's a school for bagel rolling.
And my rollers are so good at it like,
take a bagel from here, and take a bagel from there,
put it on the scale, and boom.
They'll be in within a 0.01,
of what the bagel weight should be.
So these just got finished being rolled,
so we'll cover them, so that yeast is activated,
and it's starting to make these bagels rise.
And then about an hour,
they'll be ready to go inside the fridge.
Proofing is the rising of the dough.
It is probably the most important part of any baking,
and it's how it's set up before it gets to the oven.
It is what makes the rollers so good here.
They are so educated on temperatures in the air,
the feel of the dough, that their proofing is so spot on.
So right now, these bagels are ready to go in the fridge.
You kind of feel the heat coming off of these.
So that's why they need refrigeration to stop that process.
A good bagel needs at least 24 hours of refrigeration.
That is probably one of the most important parts
of the bagel.
Each of these rack hold over a thousand.
So right here alone, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
these are half, this 7,000 bagels.
And we have two other fridges to look at.
(Scott laughing)
People, that own bagel stores
don't have as much refrigeration,
so their turnover has to be a lot quicker,
and they don't have that time, to proper ferment that dough.
We are able to turn it over like that.
So we're gonna pull out a new rack,
so we're gonna open these up,
just to release some of the frost that's inside.
If you put these in right away,
the bottoms of the bagels
will start blistering a little bit.
So you wanna let them get into the room temperature
so it'll help the process and make the bagel,
be up to my par.
(Scott laughs)
Or we can kind of come here and start this process.
Now, why do I smack it? You wanna get it off those boards.
And I'm an attention grabber,
so I always liked to make noises.
(Scott laughs)
So a lot of people these days, they'll put them in an oven,
a steam oven.
That will produce bagels a lot faster, a lot cheaper also,
but we're more into the traditional way of making.
If you look at a bagel off of our or out of the fridge,
there are creases, but they're not prominent.
If you look in here,
you're gonna start seeing the lines of the bagels,
start to come out a lot more
that means it's getting closer
to the getting out of that kettle.
If you under-kettle a bagel,
the bagels will tend to look like a baseball.
If you over-kettle a bagel, they'll come out too big,
and the crust won't be as crispy.
It's a feel on the paddle.
(Scott laughs)
It takes a lot of understanding, to get it right.
I'm a type of person for trial and error guy.
It's just who I am.
And you'll learn by your mistakes.
Mistakes are a good thing to happen
when you learn from them.
After 40 years, we're still getting better.
We season both sides of bagels.
We're making everything, we're making sesame.
Right in front of us is again
the heart and soul of our business.
It's my Middleby Marshall, 1947.
A lot of people know Marshall as Marshall amps.
Jimmy Hendricks played behind a Marshall amp,
The Doors, you know.
We originally built this store in 1980,
towards the end of the year,
we officially opened it in 1981.
So it makes this oven being used, 40 years old.
(Scott laughs)
It's a six shelf carousel.
Each shelf could fit up to, 96 bagels.
I also tell the guy running the oven,
you're the heart here, you're the commander of the ship
everybody's kind of watching that bagel baker,
and seeing what's going on here.
It is the heart and soul of our store for sure.
And everybody will ask me these questions,
"When, when, how much, this and that?"
And the answer I tell, "When it's ready."
(Scott laughs)
It's a look, it's a touch, it's a smell, it's,
that's when it's ready.
When it's right.
What we're doing right now is flipping the bagel,
because we bake on slate,
where the boards of mates of the bagel don't stick,
and also to season the bagel.
Now, the big question you haven't asked, is
"how hot are these slates?"
(Scott laughs)
One thing I tell everybody,
if they come and ask me for a baking job,
I tell them to roll up their sleeves.
And if you don't got burns, you're not a good baker.
(Scott laughs)
So I'm gonna take the sesame out first.
Oh baby, very sesame.
Look at that.
Look at that nice soft dough, nice crisp crust.
And I never could stop eating them.
(Scott laughs)
Oh, nice and toasty, those are the everything.
Sesame, salt, onion, poppy, garlic.
I love the everything bagel, that's my favorite.
Those are the blueberries.
Look at those beautiful bagels.
I mean, you could smell it through the camera.
(Scott laughs)
That's really one of the keys of Utopia's success.
You can walk in here at five o'clock in the afternoon,
and get a hot bagel out of the oven.
It's one of the things where you won't find,
in any other store in this city.
Most people are turning off their ovens,
10 o'clock in the morning, two o'clock the latest.
We're open till six at night.
And then once we close the doors we'll bake,
sometimes until 11, 12 o'clock at night.
Hot fresh bagels.
This is where we prep most of the sandwiches.
So The Works, the bagel is cream cheese on a bagel.
We chose the everything bagel, capers, red onion, tomatoes,
and then we're gonna slice some fresh Nova on it.
Open it up for them Jonah, look at that.
We develop our sandwich board.
We have over 30 different sandwiches here.
We have a lot of cool names like,
again I like old school stuff,
so, everybody has what's called "the Godfather sandwich,"
but I do an "Italian Stallion."
I'm a big fan of the Nova, the lox,
but I love to put whitefish salad, Nova, red onions,
tomatoes, little bit of capers,
on that nice, hot crispy, everything bagel,
out of this world.
(Scott laughs)
Over here, we do a big business with FreshDirect.
So this is our everything bagel.
And these are packaged fresh, then we'll freeze them.
We actually do ship to the West Coast
through a company called Goldbelly.
So all 50 States we're able to ship.
We don't put any preservatives in our bagels.
So that's why we'll bake them early in the morning,
we'll package them up, and we'll ship them through UPS
and you'll get them on your doorstep the next day.
Now what the biggest accomplish is that,
we've fed about 40 families,
throughout this pandemic and they have not missed a dime.
I remember the first day, "Are we gonna be open?"
I said, "Yes, we're essential."
We are a big community, based, store.
We service almost four generations of people.
People wake up every morning,
feeling good about coming to Utopia Bagels.
Any craft, making it by hand is special.
It takes an individual,
to be at his top of his game to make it good.
The atmosphere, the heat, the humidity,
these are all factors in time.
You have to touch things.
You have to poke things.
You have to see with your eyes visual things happening,
that they are ready.
Every one of them coming out of that oven
is just a little different.
And it is a dying breed because,
the cost of things keep going up.
That's a fight, we'll keep fighting.
I'm a firm believer, charge what you need to charge,
but make sure your quality's there.
One problem you're gonna have with my bagel,
is once you eat it,
you're just not gonna wanna eat any other bagel.
(Scott laughs)
So it becomes a little bit of a problem.