What's So Great About Plain Bagels?
Good bread doesn’t need to be fancy. Even if your bagel shop is bursting with baskets of sesame, cinnamon raisin, rye, everything… a plain bagel remains a respectable choice. After all, it’s the first kind of bagel ever made!
Anything but boring
Ok, so there’s no nuttiness of sesame, no fragrant onion, no sweet bits of fruit. But that means there’s no distraction from the flavor that the “crumb” (a baker’s term for the inside part of bread) brings to the table. Plain bagel dough contains multitudes. Ingredients like malt syrup and high-gluten flour create a slightly sweet dough with an unmistakable chewiness. The overnight “curing” that rising bagel dough undergoes adds a very subtle tang that makes bagels stand out from regular bread. All of these elements can be tasted much, much easier without the distractions toppings bring.
Crust is key
A great advantage to serving plain bagels at your next get-together is the fact that they instantly exhibit the quality of the bagel. The crust of bagels should be shiny as opposed to dull. The presence of small “blisters” on the crust surface are a sign of proper boiling before being baked. The moment you put high-quality plain bagels on the table, it becomes clear that you didn’t buy these from the frozen section.
Crowd-pleaser
When you’re a kid, you hate little flecks of anything on your food, regardless of actual taste—even if basil really does make cheese pizza better, for example. This means plain bagels are naturally kid-friendly! They can serve as a neutral base for those science experiments children sometimes undertake in the kitchen, like this (monstrous) PB&J bagel, for instance. In fact, anyone who’s a picky eater won’t say no to a plain bagel.
Young chefs making “pizza bagels” (Source)
In summary...
Dress it up, dress it down. Plain bagels are a great starting point for your kid’s breakfast, but also hold a key role in your next extravagant open-face sandwich, as well. Take this caviar-topped creation, for example. Without toppings, the plain bagel forms a solid bread base that can be a vessel for something truly incredible.