A terrific traditional taste of Eastern Europe and the Lower East
Even 43 remarkable years after opening the Deli, bialys are still mostly a mystery to folks here in Ann Arbor. While bagels long ago went mainstream and have been showing up in supermarkets, freezers, and fast-food places for decades, bialys are, to this day, still pretty much a secret. Me, I’m a big bialy fan!
If you aren’t familiar with them, bialys are the traditional “roll” of the Polish town of Bialystok—about a nine-hour drive south and west from Ostrovno, the village where the above-mentioned anarchist Sam Dolgoff was born back in 1902. They were brought to this country primarily by Polish-Jewish bakers around that same time. Back then, they were very much an everyday bread, eaten at almost every meal. In New York today, they’re still sort of readily available, but out here in the rest of the country, a bialy (let alone a good bialy) isn’t something you’ll find every day. Most Americans will go their whole lives without ever having eaten one!
We’ve been making bialys at the Bakehouse almost since we opened. One of the first things that drew us to wanting to work with our bread mentor, Michael London, back in 1992 was that we discovered that he had long ago been taught the bialy recipe from Kossar’s, my favorite Lower East Side bialy bakery. Opened in 1936 during the Great Depression, Kossar’s is clearly the classic spot to get bialys; you should definitely go next time you’re on the Lower East Side. Not surprisingly then, I was especially excited that we got to learn from someone who’d learned the recipe at the (American) source.
The key to me here is that the bialys that the crew at the Bakehouse are crafting are really, really good. And definitely something you want to check out—I will definitely be dropping by the Bakeshop next Tuesday morning to score some!
I like the way one of my favorite food writers of all time, John Thorne, described them many years ago in the wonderful book, Simple Cooking. A bialy, he wrote,
is a bagel that’s lost inside a Polish joke: its outside is crusty instead of glossy and the hole in the center doesn’t make it all the way through. But, fresh from the oven, it is a delicacy unique to itself, crisp and chew at once, the center dimple stuffed with translucent onion bits …
More directly, with a bialy, the “hole” in the center isn’t really a hole; it’s more of an indentation, a thumbprint of an impression, which is filled with lots of fresh, diced onions and plenty of poppy seeds. Since a bialy isn’t boiled before being baked, it doesn’t have as thick a crust. And as Mr. Kossar (from the above-mentioned Kossar’s) was quoted as saying in Joan Nathan’s excellent Jewish Cooking in America, “… they’ll never be like bagels, because you still have to use your fingers to make that special shape, to make that hole.”
You can do a lot of the same things with a bialy as you would a bagel. Eat ’em out of hand or try them toasted with a little Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter or Creamery Cream Cheese and some smoked salmon. Or having read Mimi Sheraton’s very lovely little book, The Bialy Eaters, I learned that back in Bialystok, people generally ate bialys by simply spreading butter across the top, not slicing them in half as we do with bagels. They’re even better if you warm them in the oven for a few minutes before you eat them.
You can only buy bialys at the Bakehouse and the Deli on Tuesday, April 1—no joke! But they do freeze just fine, so you can store them up at home to have on hand for … well, for any time you feel like a bialy.
