There's No Such Thing As Too Much Cream Cheese On A Bagel
Slate - There’s nothing quite like a good New York bagel with cream cheese. First, you bite through the crisp outer crust; then you move on to the chewy, bubbly crumb; and finally, of course, everything is overpowered by an enormous mouthful of cold white goop. Wait, no. That last part is gross. And yet it’s sadly typical. New York bagel places are giving us way too much cream cheese, and it makes no sense. I’ve puzzled over this ever since I moved to Manhattan 10 years ago for college. Weekend afternoons often found me on a bench outside the Upper West Side stalwart Absolute Bagels, awkwardly cupping my bagel in the wax paper it was served in, trying not to drop it while I scraped away globs of excess cream cheese. For a long time, I wasn’t sure if others went through the same annoying ritual, so I recently started asking around. I’ve brought it up with friends, neighbors, and strangers at bars. I’ve asked young black women and old Jewish men. While my methods are far from scientific, my research strongly suggests that most New Yorkers agree: The cream cheese is too damn much. Just how much are we talking about? Employees at a few Manhattan shops told me they add a quarter-pound, which is insane. A representative of Ess-a-Bagel, the East Side institution, said staff there are told to give about 3 ounces—only slightly less insane. In an article for Serious Eats last year, Max Falkowitz weighed samples from six New York City stores and found a range from 0.7 ounces, at Black Seed in Brooklyn, to 3.9 ounces, at Brooklyn Bagel in Manhattan. Absolute Bagel came in at 2.5 ounces, and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s favorite, Bagel Hole, served 1.7 ounces. Even those mid-range numbers are a lot. I ordered an everything bagel with “just a little cream cheese” at Bagel Hole a few weeks ago, and still had to tell the guy to scrape some off.
My concern here is not really health, though at 100 calories per ounce, all that cream cheese can’t be good for you. It’s taste. A good New York bagel doesn’t need 3 ounces of cream cheese any more than it needs 3 ounces of butter.
Cream cheese is a spread, not a sandwich filling. This wisdom is so deeply ingrained in American Jewish culture, to which we owe the bagel, that there’s a Yiddish term for the proper portion: schmear. The word itself evokes restraint, its rough schm-sound reminiscent of the knife’s halting scrape. (Compare it with, say, slather, whose pliant consonants evoke a smoothly spread dollop of sunscreen.) Or as Marc Fintz, business development director of Davidovich Bakery in Queens and a fellow cream cheese curmudgeon, put it in an email: “A cream cheese portion should be a shmear. It should be enough to bring out the delicious taste of a traditionally cured bagel. It is a complement to the taste—NOT THE TASTE!” Fintz recommends a modest half-ounce of cream cheese for a bagel with lox, and perhaps up to three-quarters of an ounce without lox.
Get the fuck out of here with this Jewish schmear nonsense. You Jews can go have your dry, cream cheese-less bagels. If you need me I’ll be the guy having a cream cheese sandwich on a bagel. Now dont get me wrong, the bagel itself is delicious too. I agree with all that talk about the crisp outer shell and the soft insides. Bagels are incredible. But at the end of the day its a conduit to get cream cheese in my mouth. I’m certainly not saying you could roll up cream cheese in a tortilla and get the same effect. The bagel is the perfect, most delicious mechanism to feed me my cream cheese. They are the perfect compliment to one another. But I absolutely need a thick layer of that CC to satisfy my bagel craving. If its like actually a “schmear” where its just a light white spread scraped on to my bagel I’d probably just throw it in the trash. Like I need the surface of my bagel to be completely hidden by cream cheese. If I can see the bread of the bagel there aint nearly enough. This half ounce recommendation is fucking NUTS. Cream Cheese and butter are not the same thing. A touch of butter makes sense. A touch of cream cheese does not. I could not disagree more that the cream cheese is a spread and not a sandwich filling. I treat my CC like peanut butter. Need a thick layer on there for a good sandwich.
Plus you can always take off your cream cheese if theres too much. You cant add on once you’ve left the store. Better to be safe than sorry in my book. Load that shit up and let me decide.
The only time I’ll agree with this idea is if your bagel is fresh out of the oven (or if your bagels are shitty and you need to toast them, woof) and the cream cheese gets completely melted and turns into a fucking soup. I never get my bagel toasted but if I go to a place where I know its going to be hot and fresh I’ll get my cream cheese on the side and I’ll just spread that shit on bite by bite. Keep the cream cheese cool and firm while I sink my teeth into the soft, warm bagel. Each bite getting like one ounce. Id say in a given sitting I’ll have like 10 ounces of cream cheese. Its just the only way to do it. Forget what the Jews say.