Why do bagels have a hole?
The short answer: so it cooks properly. The longer answer goes back to 17th-century Poland, takes a detour through the streets of New York, and ends in our kitchen in Bulduri.
In our kitchen — shaping the ring before boiling.
1. Even boiling.
Before a bagel goes into the oven, it spends about 60–90 seconds in boiling water. That boil is what locks in the chewy crust and gives a bagel its signature texture. If the centre were a solid mound of dough, the outside would overcook and the middle would still be raw. The hole equalises the heat — every part of the dough hits the same temperature at the same time.
This isn't a small detail. The boil is the step that separates a bagel from a regular bread roll. Most breads only go into the oven. A bagel goes through water first, sometimes with malt or honey added, and that's what gives the crust its slight sheen and the inside its dense, springy crumb.
2. Even baking.
Same logic, second stage. In the oven, hot air circulates through the hole, so the bagel browns and crisps from every side at once. Without a hole, the centre stays pale and slightly damp — undercooked starch, not the toasty Maillard reaction you want.
This is why a bagel that's been split, filled, and sealed up tight (some American sandwich chains do this) doesn't quite work the same way. The texture goes off. The ring shape isn't decorative — it's what lets the dough behave like a bagel from the first second of boiling to the last second of baking.
3. A practical sales solution.
Now the history. In 17th-century Kraków, bagels were sold from carts and market stalls. Bakers would thread freshly baked bagels onto long wooden poles or ropes — twenty or thirty at a time — and carry them through the streets. The hole made this physically possible. You couldn't stack a hundred warm bagels in a basket without crushing them; you could string them on a rope and walk for an hour.
This is the part that survived into New York. In the early 1900s, immigrant Jewish bakers on the Lower East Side did the same thing — strings of bagels in shop windows, sold by the dozen. The hole stopped being just about cooking and became part of how the product moved through the world.
4. The right shape for filling.
When you slice a bagel and fill it, the hole acts as a structural release valve. The filling has somewhere to go when you bite down. Without the hole, a fully loaded bagel would either squeeze its filling out the sides or rip apart in your hands. With the hole, the structure holds.
You can test this with any of our heavily-filled options — the pastrami, the chicken with pineapple and cheddar, the tuna-and-truffle. They each have a lot going on between the halves. The reason you can eat one with both hands and not have it fall apart is the same reason it has a hole in the middle.
Where the bagel came from.
The first written mention of a bagel is in the 1610 community ordinances of Kraków, where the town's Jewish council allowed bagels to be given as a small gift to women after childbirth. That's the earliest record we have. The shape was already standardised — a ring, boiled, then baked — which means the technique was older than the document.
From Poland, the bagel travelled with Ashkenazi Jewish communities across Eastern Europe — Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine — and then across the Atlantic. By the 1880s there were bagel bakeries in Manhattan's Lower East Side. By the 1930s, New York had a Bagel Bakers Local 338 union with strict rules about how bagels could be made. The boil-then-bake method was non-negotiable. So was the hole.
Latvia sits geographically inside the same Eastern European belt where the bagel originated, so the form is not foreign here. The version we serve at Bagel&Co is closer to the New York style — slightly larger, denser crumb, deep-baked crust — because that's the recipe lineage we trained on.
Bagel vs. donut vs. pretzel.
People mix these up because they all have holes. They aren't the same.
Donut: deep-fried in oil, usually sweet, hole helps it cook through in fat. Soft, airy crumb.
Pretzel: dipped in a lye or baking-soda bath before baking. The dip gives it the dark brown crust and the slightly bitter flavour. No hole in a traditional pretzel — the loops are decorative.
Bagel: boiled in water (sometimes with malt) for under two minutes, then baked. Hole helps the dough cook evenly. Dense, chewy crumb. Usually savoury.
Same general family — yeasted bread products — but three completely different cooking methods produce three completely different textures.
New York vs. Montreal.
If you've travelled in North America you may have run into the Montreal bagel — smaller, sweeter, with a wider hole and a noticeably different crust. The difference comes from the boiling step: Montreal bagels are boiled in honey water, then baked in a wood-fired oven. New York bagels are usually boiled in malt water and baked in a regular oven.
Both are real bagels. Both have holes for the same reason. The flavour profile is just tuned differently. Ours leans New York.
A bagel without a hole isn't a bagel.
It's a roll. Maybe a tasty one. But the texture won't be right, the crust won't develop properly, and the filling won't hold. The hole isn't a stylistic choice. It's the part of the design that makes everything else work.
You can see it for yourself — come into the Bulduri location any morning before 11 and you'll watch us shape them. Each one is rolled by hand, the hole pressed through with two fingers, then boiled and baked over the next 20 minutes.