The New York-style bagel is known the world over, but the Montreal bagel is now making its mark in Colorado, as Small Batch Bagels of Boulder churns out the hand-rolled, smaller and salt-free bagels.
Fatima Hirji, who started the company last May, got hooked on the bagels as a student at Concordia University in Montreal. Sneaking out to the famed Fairmount and St-Viateur bakeries during study breaks, she was determined to mimic the recipes and create the Montreal bagel in Colorado. But it proved more difficult than she expected; it took more than a year to get the chemistry correct.
“Its just a bagel, for God’s sake,” she recalls thinking. “It can’t be that hard.”
It was — but Hirji finally found the right formula.
Ismailimail 