How To Pick The Best Bagels At The Grocery Store Every Time

If you usually buy bagels at the grocery store, you might be looking in the wrong place. While you'd expect that the freshly made bagels from the bakery counter would be your best bet, Sheena Otto, the eponymous executive baker of Sheena's Cocina, revealed a surprising reason why that may not be the case. "Typically, freezer section bagels are produced ... with the specialized equipment and ingredients that are specific to bagel making," she told The Takeout. "This will automatically produce a different bagel from a store that is trying to make a close approximation using the equipment they already have on hand." Another advantage that frozen bagels have is that, according to Otto, "An operation producing bagels for supermarkets operates at extremely high volume, and their production relies on consistent, reliable results, which is what you will always get." 

If you plan to buy just one bagel to eat right away, a fresh-baked one might still be your first choice. "Bagels made in-house are often made with whole ingredients, just flour, water, salt, and yeast, and lack the stabilizers you might find in freezer bagels that would prolong shelf life," Otto noted. That's great for some folks but also means they'll likely go stale pretty quickly. While there is no evidence that bagels were invented to soothe teething babies, they can certainly become hard enough to serve that purpose. (Not that we're advocating this be done without supervision, since bagels — fresh, stale, or frozen — may present a potential choking hazard for infants.)

Once you locate the bagels in your supermarket's frozen foods section — they should be somewhere near other frozen bread products but may also be over by the breakfast foods — you might be presented with a variety of brands, including O'Dough's and Lender's. There could also be a selection of flavors such as blueberry, everything, onion, and plain. 

Once you've narrowed it down, is there any way of selecting the best bag of your chosen variety? Well, yes and no. According to Sheena Otto, "There is no way to really differentiate frozen bagels from one another, the same way you would choose one piece of fresh produce over another, but there are some things to look for."

Otto's advice is to find a bag that doesn't contain ice crystals, since these tend to form when frozen foods have been improperly stored at some point. If you can see inside the print of the packaging, she also suggested choosing bagels with smooth skin because any imperfections may be a red flag. "This is a sign of age, as the moisture in the bagel slowly seeps out, and the inner structure of the bagel begins to weaken and dimple or wrinkle the surface of the bagel," said Otto.

The easy way to keep bagels fresh for a lot longer is to freeze them yourself, which is what you should do if you purchase some from the supermarket bakery section. Sheena Otto advised leaving the bagels unsliced and untoasted and wrapping each one in plastic wrap, then labeling them with the purchase date. The reason for the date label is so you can try to eat all of the bagels within 30 days. As Otto told us, "They won't spoil, but they may start to taste like your freezer after a month or so." Of course, a little freezer burn can usually be camouflaged to some extent by toasting, and doing so will give you a chance to figure out what that bagel button on your toaster can actually do.

If you've followed Otto's recommendation and purchased frozen bagels, she said, "The bagels are often flash frozen much more quickly than your home freezer, preserving the quality of the bagel to the point where you might not be able to tell a thawed bagel from one that was made 12 hours prior." You don't need to do anything special to store them, other than sticking the bag in the freezer, but she suggested that frozen bagels, too, are at their best if eaten within a month of purchase.