Turkic Roots of Bagel

According to Marek Halter (The Jewish Odyssey), Khazars are the connection between The Uighurs of Xinjiang and Poland in bringing finally to the world what we know as a bagel. 


Mavi Boncuk | 


The bagel (or sometimes beigel, in Poland also bajgiel, bajgel, precel, obwarzanek) is a food traditionally made of yeasted wheat dough in the form of a roughly hand-sized ring which is boiled and then baked. The result is a dense, chewy, doughy interior with a browned and sometimes crisp exterior.


The Uighurs of Xinjiang, China enjoy a form of bagel known as girde nan, which is one of several types of nan, the bread eaten in Xinjiang (Allen, March 1996, p. 36-37). It is uncertain if the Uighur version of the bagel was developed independently of Europe or was the actual origin of the bagels that appeared in Central Europe.

In Turkey, though narrower and larger, simit [1] is very similar to sesame seed bagels and is prepared by boiling the dough in water sweetened with molasses and coating heavily with roasted sesame seeds. (hints of Montreal [2])

[1] A simit (Turkish), Aramaic qeluro/qelora, koulouri (Greek: κουλούρι), đevrek (Serbian: ђеврек), gjevrek (Macedonian: ѓеврек) or gevrek (Bulgarian: геврек) (the last three, from "gevrek" in Turkish, meaning "crisp", which is, in some parts of Turkey, colloquial to "simit") is a circular bread with sesame seeds, very common in Turkey, as well as in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and other parts of the Balkans and Middle East such as Lebanon.

[2] The two most prominent styles of traditional bagel in North America are the Montreal bagel and the New York bagel. The Montreal bagel contains malt and egg and no salt; it is boiled in honey-sweetened water before baking in a wood oven; and it is predominantly either of the noir/"black seed" (poppy) or blanc/"white seed" (sesame seed) variety. The New York bagel contains salt and malt, is available in a wider variety of flavors (though Montreal's oldest bagel institution is quickly catching up), and is also boiled prior to baking in a standard oven. The resulting New York bagel is puffy with a noticeable crust, while the celebrated Montreal bagel is smaller (though with a larger hole) chewier, sweeter and even less like a frozen supermarket-variety "roll-with-a-hole" than the New York bagel is.