“The problem with the machines is their bagels are too perfect. They all look the same. So everything winds up looking like a Krispy Kreme donut, this perfectly round thing,” he says. Machines also need soft dough. “So you get a softer bagel, which is not what you want, you want a firm bagel.” The bagels prized by New Yorkers, with their puffy insides and shiny exteriors, are still best crafted by hand.
Jewish immigrants continued to operate and staff independent bagel shops well into the 2000s, but the dissolution of Local 338 opened up the bagel-making labor pool to non-Jewish workers. Like much of New York’s food-service workforce, many bagel rollers are Mexican. But many are of Thai descent. In How to Feed Friends and Influence People, Milton Parker, the late author and co-owner of Carnegie Deli, writes that the Thai government invited members of Local 338 to come to Thailand in the 1990s to train local residents. Government officials hoped to develop a local bagel industry; instead the newly minted bagel rollers immigrated to New York in search of work.
Due to their ability to work swiftly and efficiently, bagel rollers can earn a sizable salary by working for several shops at once. The fastest produce upwards of 500 bagels in an hour, hopping from store to store and handling as many as four yields daily. Fuentes, an immigrant from Mexico who has been rolling bagels since he learned from a Jewish-American boss 20 years ago, prefers the stability of working at one shop. But he understands why peers prefer otherwise.
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