FOOD & LIFE

Austin's Rockstar: Building a better bagel

Joe Humel's on a mission to convince city that his favorite bread product isn't just a roll with a hole in the middle.

By Jeff Salamon
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, September 09, 2009

To make the sort of bagels Joe Humel would like to make, he needs a two-room kitchen. In one room, he and his employees would mix their dough into a sturdy mound, cut off a small piece, roll it into a sausagelike shape, join both ends together and repeat the process hundreds of times before storing the moist, dense hoops in a refrigerator where they would ferment for 24 hours. In the second room, the previous day's raw bagels would be boiled for a minute, baked until the crust takes on a golden hue, allowed to cool on a rack and then bagged for delivery.

The kitchen Joe Humel has worked in for the past six months is not that kitchen. Located on an isolated stretch of West Fourth Street, it's a one-room affair that Humel's company, Rockstar Bagels, shares with a few other businesses. His modest rent buys him a few shelves of storage and refrigerator space, a counter where he can plant his secondhand Welbilt Varimixer and the run of the place seven late nights a week.

Because everything is done at the same time in the same place, Humel's job is trickier than he'd like it to be. While he and his kitchen assistant Amanda Picklesimer are mixing and shaping the dough, Humel's kitchen manager Ben White is dropping 15 raw bagels at a time into two large pots of boiling water, turning the room into a savory steam bath. The humidity, which waxes and wanes over the course of a long, hot, mid-July night, wreaks havoc with the temperamental dough.

Which is one reason those of us who frequently buy Humel's bagels have noticed that they change from day to day. Sometimes the 300 to 400 bagels he produces daily are too puffy. Sometimes the trademark chewy crust is uncharacteristically pallid and soft. Sometimes it's so tooth-rattlingly chewy it'll have your dentist seeing dollar signs.

Humel knows this isn't the way things should be; for a fledgling wholesaler, consistency is key. His clients expect that tomorrow's bagels will be the same as today's, and that today's will be the same as yesterday's.

But for some people, perhaps, Rockstar bagels' unpredictability is part of their charm. In a world full of mass-produced, interchangeable bagels, it's unusual to encounter one that offers palpable evidence that it was created by a certain person in a certain place at a certain time.

The accidental baker

Joe Humel says he has never been a New Year's Eve kind of guy. "Every time I try to go out there's always something bad that happens, or just nothing eventful," he says. This past Dec. 31 he was feeling particularly hermitlike. "I'm going to stay home and get up early, and I thought about it, and I'm like, maybe I'll try making bagels tomorrow."

Humel, who describes himself as "a hack rock 'n' roll drummer," didn't have much experience as a cook, and certainly none as a professional baker. When he was growing up in Queens in New York City, his Italian grandmother ruled the kitchen, which meant Humel had little reason to learn his way around a stove.

So his interest in making bagels on the morning of Jan. 1 didn't spring from a powerful entrepreneurial urge. Humel, who had been living in Austin for a couple of years, playing drums for the likes of Kacy Crowley and working the door at the Saxon Pub, simply missed the authentic New York-style bagels he had grown up with. For that first New Year's Day batch, he had only one customer in mind: himself.

"I'd been wanting to do it for months," Humel says, sitting at Dominican Joe's on East Riverside Drive, which, as it happens, is one of his clients. "I went to the store and bought what I thought were the ingredients to make some bagels. I made my first batch, and they came out all right."

Humel enjoyed the challenge of doing something new. "I had no gigs lined up, and I was pretty broke at that point, so I figured whatever I make, I can live off of, I can eat," Humel says. "So that's all I did, make bagels for about two to three weeks, researching on the Internet hours and hours a day."

And the bagels were getting better. "They were nowhere near as good as New York," he says. "But they were somewhere in between. And that's pretty good."

And just as Humel started to wonder if maybe there was a business plan hiding in the recipes he was finding online, a friend asked him to bring a few of his bagels by Garden District, the South Congress Avenue coffee shop where he worked. "I didn't even think about it," Humel says. "I was like, yeah, that's kind of cool."

The proprietors of the shop thought Humel's bagels were pretty good and said they would take half a dozen a day. Could he start tomorrow?

Humel wasn't legal at that point. He wasn't incorporated, he wasn't set up in a commercial kitchen and he didn't have a license to sell food. So he borrowed a few thousand dollars from his parents and found a kitchen on Craigslist. The state license, which he keeps in a box in his house, is dated Jan. 25.

Twenty-four days after he baked his first bagel, Joe Humel was in the bagel business.

Bagels: A love story

"Bagels were not originally made to be soft, large rolls," says Monroe Bober, who knows from what he speaks. Bober, 88, has lived in Austin for 16 years, but he recalls the bagels of his Brooklyn youth with the fondness other people reserve for their grandmother's fried chicken. "The bagels we used to get were much smaller than current bagels," he says. "They were crisp on the outside, relatively soft and light on the inside, much unlike the bagels we get at Einstein's."

If you're under the impression that a bagel is, in fact, a soft, large roll, you could be forgiven. Since they became a mainstream American culinary institution, bagels have moved further and further away from their origins. What was once dense, chewy and small has become soft, crumbly and vaguely elephantine.

In her recent book, "The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread" (Yale University Press), Maria Balinska tentatively traces the bagel back to a number of ring-shaped bread antecedents: the Chinese girde, the Italian taralli and the bagel's closest cousin, the Polish obwarzanek. Though the precise moment when a distinctively Jewish bagel first emerged can't be pinned down, Balinska nods toward the fraught interactions of Poles and Jews in late 16th- and early 17th-century Poland.

Balinska, a journalist based in London, offers one explanation for the seemingly universal appeal of ring-shaped breads: "Rings are innately appealing to children," she says by phone. "They're so easy to grasp and easy to play with."

As we get older, Balinska says, ring-shaped foods take on a more transcendent appeal. "My sense is that because there is no beginning and no end to a ring, it has that sense of, that hint of, possible perfection."

Perhaps the history of the bagel, like the bagel itself, is coming full circle, from hand-crafted ethnic foodstuff to bland commercial fare and back to artisanal bread. Think of how beer, which was transformed during the 20th century from small-batch ale to watery mass product, has undergone a microbrew revival in recent decades.

If Rockstar Bagels is emblematic of a similar trend, it's too early to tell. In Austin, the dominant purveyor is Hot Jumbo Bagel , which services Whole Foods and Central Market. Though it's a local institution, it produces a typical American bagel: large, bready and available in a profusion of flavors, including chocolate, peanut butter and cranberry walnut orange.

Jack Ranstrom, general manager of Mozart's Coffee Roasters on Lake Austin Boulevard, which has carried Hot Jumbo bagels for years, tried his first Rockstar bagel a few months ago. "I was overwhelmed by the quality difference between them and our previous supplier," he says. Ranstrom asked Humel to start delivering a dozen a day, which would account for a quarter of Mozart's bagel sales. The response was so positive that after a few months Ranstrom decided to flip the ratio; today, a rotation of Rockstar's seven flavors — plain, poppy seed, sesame seed, onion, garlic, salt-and-rosemary and "everything" — accounts for 75 percent of Mozart's bagels.

Since reading a small item about Rockstar Bagels in this newspaper three months ago , Monroe Bober and his wife Martha, 83, have been picking them up at the Wheatsville Food Co-op twice a month. (It's a special trip; the Bobers do most of their shopping at Central Market and H-E-B.)

Like most New Yorkers, the Bobers haven't been shy about saying what they think. Though Martha Bober thought the taste of her first Rockstar bagel was excellent, she e-mailed Humel to tell him the crust was too soft. But she's also let Humel know he's getting closer to her ideal. "It's still not perfect, but it's getting better," she says.

When the doughing gets tough

"Bagel dough is the stiffest of all doughs," Humel says, standing in his kitchen, presiding over a lump of the stuff. Where most bread flour is 10 to 11 percent gluten and more than 60 percent water, proper bagel dough is more than 14 percent gluten and less than 50 percent water , which makes for a stretchier dough. The recalcitrant mass, made of nothing but flour, water, salt, yeast and liquid malt, looks more like taffy than bread dough, and its tenacity is hard on the machines that mix it. Twice this summer, the second-hand mixer that Humel bought for $700 has broken down, forcing him to temporarily use a client's kitchen to mix his dough. Recently, he bought a much larger and, he hopes, more resilient mixer that will allow him to prepare batches of 600 bagels at a time rather than his current 40. The $15,000 he put down for the mixer and a new stove is a considerable expense, and Humel needed to turn to a silent investor to make the purchases.

The bagel business, it turns out, is as tough as the dough. Though Humel works six nights a week, he makes just enough to pay his rent and cover most of his expenses. If he can get the number of bagels he sells each day up from his current 300 to 400 to somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000, he figures that would add up to a pretty good career.

"At 75 cents a bagel wholesale, you have to sell a lot of bagels to make a living," he says.

His biggest Phan

To make ends meet, Humel has a seasonal job with a guerrilla marketing firm, traveling to various cities and operating a specialized projector that throws images onto the sides of buildings.

One mid-July night, Humel engages in a bit of guerrilla marketing of his own. After preparing the next day's bagels, he heads over to the Saxon Pub to listen to Charlie Faye, a singer-songwriter for whom he sometimes plays drums. Humel is there to support his friend, but he brings along more than his bonhomie; he's carrying a bag of bagels cut up into bite-size pieces for easy sampling.

From the stage, Faye, a Jewish woman who grew up in Manhattan, pauses between songs to tell the crowd that she loves Austin but misses a good New York bagel. She gives a shout out to Rockstar Bagels and encourages everyone to stop by the stage and sample. The offerings don't last very long.

Small-scale incursions like this aside, Humel hasn't been very aggressive about marketing. He hasn't approached Whole Foods or Central Market because he's not prepared to take on that sort of capacity and because he's still tinkering with his product.

"As a musician, you don't go straight for the major label," Humel says. "You're going to start off creating a buzz. It's the same in this business."

Linda Phan, the executive director of Saheli , an Austin group that deals with domestic violence, is one Austinite who has fallen headlong into Humel's business plan. Phan, 33, is pregnant and has been grappling with one of those classic expectant-mom cravings: She's jonesing for a good salt bagel. Phan was already a fan of Humel's bagels, but his standard salt-and-rosemary bagel wasn't going to hit the spot. She e-mailed him to ask if he could make her a special batch of salt-and-rosemary bagels, hold the rosemary.

"I am so glad that you have opened up a bagel business in Austin, which serves REAL bagels," Phan wrote Humel on July 20. "Although I'm Vietnamese-American, I believe I was a Jewish woman in my past life and somewhat of an unsolicited critic of the bagel."

Humel agreed to make Phan a dozen salt bagels and hung around his kitchen until she showed up at 10 p.m. — even though she was supposed to be there at 9, and even though he needed to relocate to another kitchen after his mixer broke down earlier that evening.

"I've got a lot of respect for how he runs his business," says Phan, who went through her dozen bagels in a matter of days. "My mother and father were small business people, and they've taught me a thing or two about connecting with folks. And I think Joe's got it."

Fueled by the enthusiasm of customers like Phan, Ranstrom and the Bobers, Humel had planned to move this week into the two-room kitchen that would allow him to make bagels the way he'd like to make them, boiling and baking in one room and preparing dough in the other. But after Humel shipped his new mixer and oven to the new location and paid an inspector $410 to come by to give the space the city's seal of approval, the kitchen's owner told Humel the bagel operation was too big for the kitchen and he'd have to find another space.

Humel was beside himself. "After all this money I spent!" he says.

So, for now, it's back to the one-room space on Fourth Street and the search for the kitchen of Joe Humel's dreams. He's already got his eye on another place he hopes to move into by the end of the month.

If that works out and Rockstar evolves into a lucrative enterprise, Humel would eventually like to hand over his chef's hat and focus on running the business — marketing, distribution and maybe opening his own retail outlet.

"Being a drummer, I never had any control over the product," he says of his musical career. "I was just the drummer, just played on stuff, didn't write the songs. So I didn't have a lot of say on how, once you have this product, well, how's it going to go? How are you going to make it a success?

"Now, I have control."

jsalamon@statesman.com; 445-3610