I live in an area (the Chicago north shore suburbs) with very wild splits in bagel quality/authenticity (deeply Jewish areas with lots of NYC transplants, interspersed with the WASPiest places I’ve ever seen). Sometimes the bespoke delis are less able to make decent bagels than the grocery stores!

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Maybe everyone there thinks those *are* bagels? So they don’t know what they’re missing.

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This is just a guess, but I think the thing that non-nyc bagel makers leave out is the boiling in water with barley malt syrup before baking. If you don’t do that you just get rolls with holes.

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I’d be interested in a similar taste test for bagels made with the apparently magical New York City tap water

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IQ tests focused on all the things I was good at and ignored literally everything else. They should have been interpreted as "oh, you need *that* kind of help," not "oh good, we can dump you in the deep end and forget about you."

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