Having grown up in New York City, I don’t know if even all Jews know what a bialy is. Technically it’s not even a Jewish food, but a Polish one. But to me, it’s a Jewish food.
If you ask Wikipedia, which is usually quite good at this sort of trivia, a bialy is:
“a Yiddish word short for bialystoker kuchen, from Białystok, a city in Poland, … and is a chewy yeast roll similar to a bagel [insert editorial snort, here -- Nina]. Unlike a bagel, which is boiled before baking, a bialy is simply baked, and instead of a hole in the middle it has a depression. Before baking, this depression is filled with diced onions ….”
I adore a good bialy, and it’s harder to find in California than a decent bagel. Ray’s New York Bagels came to the rescue, with their frozen What’s a Bialy.
Pros:
- These are available in a lot of stores, including our local safeway. Here’s the link to the stores that carry the bagels, so you should be able to get the Bialys there too.
- They are GOOD! I mean very good. To say a bialy is nothing more than a bagel that’s not been boiled before baking is like saying your home movie of your visit to Death Valley is just like Lawrence of Arabia without the professional writing, directing, editing and acting. A good bialy is more like a tiny but perfect pizza which is 90% the best “pizza bones” (the crust) ever, and 10% diced grilled onions or maybe poppy seeds or both.
Cons:
- They are addicting. Very highly addicting.
- The instructions on the box are wrong. It says “keep frozen” and then “Pop in toaster or toaster oven…” OK, unless you have one of those toasters with a really wide slot – it would have to be a toaster oven. But more importantly this step will just finish baking them. Bialys then need to be sliced in 1/2 and toasted before you spread them with cream cheese or butter. Since these are slightly esoteric foods, I think the instructions need to be more clear.
But it’s complicated, because you can’t slice them from a frozen state. So this is what I’ve found works best: Nuke them first for about 24 seconds each (depending on your microwave oven) until defrosted sufficiently to slice in 1/2.
Then toast them until lightly browned.
If you moved away from New York City and thought you’d have to go back to get a decent bialy, you were probably right, until now. These are good bialys.
Western Bagel in Los Angeles makes excellent bagels for their own outlets (but you want to buy them fresh, like within an hour of baking), and slightly less good ones sold in local groceries (which are perforce hours or days old when you get them).
They have something in the outlets they call a bialy, it’s not even round but a roundish bar. I never asked if it was boiled before baking – but it tastes *exactly* like the bagels, so I doubt it’s done differently, or doesn’t seem to matter if it is.
fwiw
I like the bialy’s at the Cheeseboard in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto.
Greetings:
Based on my youth in the Bronx of the ’50s and ’60s, a bialy is what you get when they’ve run out of bagels.
A bialy is kind of a cross between a bagel and an English muffin but much, much better than either.
(I just noticed that it kind of says that on the box.)
I only know of Max Bialystock. I never knew until now that his name meant something. Learn sumpin’ new every day.
(BTW, the original movie version of “The Producers” is the ONLY one. They cut Lorenzo St. Dubois when they made the play, therefore I dismiss it.)
For toasting, you get one of those old-fashioned butterfly toasters with the heating element on one side and the flip-able cover on the other. Bake until light brown, then turn it and bake the other side. Works for bagels, too………..
I found one recently in my local Israeli bakery, but they called them something else. (By the way, your normal Israeli bakery (as opposed to the bagel specialty places) does not make New-York-style bagels; they make something thinner and larger.
Do you know the high priest brought bagels every day in the Temple? No, really. The Chavitim were boiled, then baked, then fried. Of course, like everything else there, they were Matzah (which used to be thicker than it is now).
Walked into my favorite Bagel shop the other day and they had nothing on the shelf but Bialeys.
“Hey Max!” I said “Why no bagels today?”
“What can I tell you?” he shrugged “We ran out of holes”
Who is going chime in except Jews? Only Jews know about bialys. I love them. Being outside NYC I have not eaten one for years but toasted with butter they are a delicacy. Here hoping that Romney scores a record number of Jewish votes. This just might happen, then we can have a case of the best Lower East Side bialy sent to the White House
Bialy are better than bagels