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Today on Weird History Food we are looking into a long standing question - as old as bagels and donuts themselves! ...Exactly why IS i that Bagels and Donuts have holes? Who decided that, and what is the reason for it? Many theories and ideas abound, but, join us as we uncover the absolute tasty truth of both!
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Today on Weird History Food, we're digging to the bottom of an age-old mystery
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Why do bagels and donuts have holes? The first potential examples of holy bread can be found in Egyptian hieroglyphics
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So why, over millennia, have millions of people across multiple cultures continued to make these middle-less creations
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The answer is two-fold. Hulled rolls bake more evenly, without that big, doughy center to worry about
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And they can more easily be stacked on sticks or strung up on strings. This makes them perfect for carrying around the market or for stacking up high in bakery windows
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Still, there's one major difference between these circular breads of old and modern American bagels
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American bagels are traditionally boiled, giving them a protective outer shell that makes them last longer than other breads
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The first bagels have been traced back to 13th century Polish Jews
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Though anti-Semitic legislation was prevalent in Poland at the time, with laws dictating what professions Jews could have
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bakeries were one industry in which jewish trades people could for the most part participate freely
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what's more their christian neighbors all of whom then observed lent actively sought out lean and
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boring foods for their annual 40-day fast and in the jewish-owned bakeries these pious christians
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found just the thing the obverzhanic which is a big boiled ring-shaped bread often meant for
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multiple people or multiple servings unless you a true hero obverzhanic started selling like with holes in the middle and soon their smaller counterparts gained steam too This single version of the Obwyrzonic known in Yiddish as the bagel quickly became all the rage in Poland
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Centuries later, Polish Jews immigrated to the United States, bringing their traditional
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boiled bagels with them. But bagels themselves remained elusive to America's wider population
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for almost two whole centuries. But all of that changed in 1918, with Canadian inventor
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Meyer Thompson's creation of the world's first ever bagel machine. Huh, wonder what it does
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Since the dawn of bread making, people across the globe have been frying and sweetening their dough
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But unlike the bagel, the donut, the ultimate fried sweet dough is American origins. In the 17th and
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18th centuries, Dutch immigrants brought with them their own sweet dough balls called olly cooks
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which translated means oil cakes. Some think these olly cooks were the predecessors to
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contemporary American doughnuts, while others point to English sweet dough recipes that made
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their way stateside around the same time. But in 1847, the American doughnut was ready to set
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itself apart from its foreign competition. According to legend, it was then that American
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sailor Hanson Gregory became the first to put a hole in the center of his dough ball. Hanson put
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a hole in the center of his dough balls for the same reason that everyone else had done it across
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time, to make them bake more evenly. Circular doughnuts soon after became America's favorite
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circular food. Regardless, there's still plenty of room for both edible rings and the American appetite
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