Providence Bagel
Providence Bagel is a modern-day bagel shop with a lot of the old-fashioned ways. People always say, “Well, what makes you different than everybody else?” And my explanation is we’re a little more of a nontraditional but traditional bagel shop, if that makes any sense.
A lot of people forget that yeast is actually a living thing, so when you talk to it and condition it … Give him a little helping hand.
He needed it.
Along with giving it the right flour and water to make sure he’s all set and happy, putting that extra effort and care into it really shows through the bagels through the entire process. And you can taste that, I swear you can. Come in and try it. I’m Katie.
I’m Shannon.
And I’m Amber.
And this is how we make bagels.
And this is how we make bagels.
And this is how we make bagels.
We’re going to start with our salt, sugar, and brown sugar and we then throw in some malt, which really gives us that flavor of a signature bagel. And then we add our water, flour, and then we finish off with our yeast. And then we let it go for 15 minutes. And once our dough is nice and rested, we cut it into these big, long strips and we feed it into our divider, which cuts our dough into five-ounce portion. It then goes from our divider into our shaper, which is this really cool long belt that shapes our bagels for us. And then we catch them at the end, give them a little stretch, and then place them on the rack.
The traditional, old-school way of making bagels is boiling because the technology just wasn’t there back then.
This is the baking process. We simply place our bagels three by five on the board. We top them and then we proof them and bake them.
A lot of old-school bagel shops are switching over to our process, which is just much more efficient.
After about 20 or 30 minutes proofing, the bagels will come out. And they’re a little bit poofier and they look really wet, so we take them to our oven, we load them in, and then as soon as we load them in and we close the door, we hit the steam.
What it basically does, is in a very short layman’s terms way, you get that really nice crust from the water vapor. So it’s about 16 seconds of really hot water vapor which shoots at the bagels, and then it bakes for about 10 to 15 minutes, depending on the bagels that we’re making that day.
We have 24 flavors of bagels every single day.
We have plan, everything- Whole wheat. Sesame. Onion. Whole wheat sesame. Poppy. Garlic. Whole wheat everything. Salt. Pumpernickel. Sunflower. Blueberry. Spinach. Asiago. Chocolate chip. Parmesan. French toast. Cinnamon sugar. Cinnamon raisin.
We have a lot. Yeah, basically we have a lot. When you come into Providence Bagel, we like to give all of our customers options. So some people come in and just get a bagel as is, walk out, and eat it the traditional way with nothing on it. You can get a bagel with a spread, we have eight spreads every single day. And then we also do sandwiches, so breakfast sandwiches, lunch sandwiches, with all different options to put on those.
As a team, we’re very creative people so we love coming up with new ideas all the time.
One day we were trying to figure out how to make a really good cinnamon bun, and we wanted to be different so we thought, “Why don’t we take dough from the bagel and actually make that into a cinnamon bun?”
So I’m going to be showing you how we assemble our bagel buns, both sweet and savory. You start with a bagel, you pull it in half, you mush it down, and then you take the roller, roll them, and then they’re ready to be filled. We very rarely just make regular cinnamon buns. These are our savory bagel buns. Today our flavors are Asiago everything, jalapeno cheddar, ham and swiss, and pizza bagels. It’s kind of like an entire bagel sandwich all rolled up, at least for the savory buns.
And then with the sweet, it offers you a lot more opportunity to combine flavors. My personal favorite is our Oreo bun. We dip it into Oreo crumbs, make sure both sides are fully covered, and then we take a smear that we made with Oreo crumbs and we smear it on the inside. And then we roll that baby up and then we bake it, and once it’s baked we ice it. And the icing, of course, has Oreo crumbs in it. It’s amazing. There’s not even words for it. Just better than an Oreo, which you wouldn’t think is possible.
Honestly, what makes our bagels so special is the care and effort that we put into making this dough.
We recommend Providence Bagel because it’s something different, it’s an experience every single time.
All of our front-house staff try to be super, super friendly and create this great environment where you get a bagel that’s made with love and care from back here and then just continued effort into making it the best bagel or bagel sandwich or bagel bun that you will ever have.
