It's pastry, for crying out loud! How can you have good pastry without butter (or equivalent)?
Goose fat is lovely, or so I hear. Not being one to roast a goose, nor one to attempt baking pastries, I've never tried it myself.
To the traditional plain, poppyseed, and sesame, I'll add the egg bagel. And I'll admit a fondness for the fatfest that is the cheese bagel, but I fully recognize that it is not the industry standard. After that, they are round rolls of various flavors, including the cinnamon raisin.
And yes, you can get wonderful bagels in LA, you just have to search them out and avoid anything called "Noah's" like the plague.
Except that "everything" is one of the new flavors and thus can't be used to define the set of all bagels.
Also everything bagels do not have cinammon or raisins which were grandfathered in to classic list. Thus it cannot be a true "everything" bagel and is misnamed.
Quick Excited Denial...
Two words: cranberry bagels.
t shudder
Who grandfathered in cinnamon raisin bagels? I've always hated them. They fail my basic bagel need, which is to be a vehicle for lox and cream cheese.
But cinammon raisin has always been there. Never been my favorite either (I agree that a bagel is ideally a vehical for creamcheese and lox.) But I know Cinammon-raisin was there when I was a kid, and I think well before that too. So it is grandfathered because it was one of the classics. Not everything authentic is good. On the other hand, cheese jalepano, thought not a great vehicle for lox, and not classic is GOOD. As opposed to the damn thing someone tried to offer me as a bagel the other day. It was soft. Roll with a hole.
Two words: cranberry bagels.
Those actually taste kinda good.
IJS.
While we're doing comparative foodstuffs, can I enquire of Americans what exactly classic American apple pie entails? I have images in my head-- of what I'd call apple crumble-- but I suspect I'm wildly off the mark. Enlighen me?
Classic American pie has bottom pie crust, and apple based filling and a top pie crust. Someone once told me it was actually invented in Egypt.
