A bagel machine is a machine that automatically produces
bagels
A bagel ( yi, בײגל, translit=beygl; pl, bajgiel; also spelled beigel) is a bread roll originating in the Jewish communities of Poland. It is traditionally shaped by hand into a roughly hand-sized ring from yeasted wheat dough that is fir ...
. It rolls, presses, and shapes dough into perfect circles.
History
In 1950,
Daniel Thompson, son of Mickey Thompson, began designing an automatic bagel-making machine when he was 29. His father had been trying to make a working automatic bagel-making machine for most of his life to advance his baking business,
and Daniel was following in his footsteps.
In 1958, Daniel Thompson started construction of the first successful automatic bagel-making machine in his garage in
Cheviot Hills, Los Angeles
Cheviot Hills is a neighborhood on the Westside of the city of Los Angeles, California.
Founded in 1924, the neighborhood has served as the filming location of movies and television shows due to its convenient location between Sony Studios a ...
. He called it “The Thompson Bagel Machine”. A few years later, he patented his design. One year later, in 1961, he and his wife established the "Thompson Bagel Machine Manufacturing Corporation".
[{{Cite news, url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/22/daniel-thompson-who-brought-bagels-to-the-masses-but-miffed-purists-dead-at-94/, title=The inventor who revolutionized and maybe ruined the bagel, dead at 94, last=Kaplan, first=Sarah, date=2015-09-22, newspaper=Washington Post, access-date=2017-09-19, language=en-US, issn=0190-8286] Five years after he started construction of the bagel machine, he leased the successful and perfected design to
Murray Lender, who owned a family-run bagel-making business.
The first automated bagel-making machines were introduced to
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is located on New Haven Harbor on the northern shore of Long Island Sound in New Haven County, Connecticut and is part of the New York City metropolitan area. With a population of 134 ...
,
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second-largest city in the U.S. state of New York (behind only New York City) and the seat of Erie County. It is at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of the Niagara River, and is across the Canadian border from Sou ...
, and
St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...
in 1963, producing between 200 and 400 bagels per hour. The largest machines could produce as many as 5,000 bagels in an hour.
Bagels had very quickly become extremely popular and were in an abundance supermarkets and restaurants because of Daniel Thompson’s bagel making machine. The price of the bagel has dropped significantly because they are now being mass produced everywhere in the world.
Impact
Before Thompson's automatic bagel-making machine was invented, making bagels was a slow process. Very few bakers actually made them. After the automatic bagel machine was invented, many more bagels were produced and the bagel became much more common. The automatic bagel-making machine popularized the bagel, leading to it being featured in many supermarkets and restaurants around the world. Today, far more bagels are being produced than ever before.
Use and features
The bagel machine automatically mass creates bagels by rolling the bagels, shaping the bagels, and pressing the bagels until they are a circular shape.
References
Bagels
Food preparation
Machines