“Toastim” – Israeli Bagel Toast

I started out thinking this might not be a real sandwich, like maybe somebody was putting fake entries in the Wikipedia List of Sandwiches just to mess with me. When I first started searching for bagel toast recipes online, I got a lot of results for avocado toast made from bagels, or French toast made from bagels, or random combinations of ingredients that people put on a toasted bagel one night after a few too many and felt they had to share with the Internet. I even saw a reference to Winston, the infamous Bagel Man who worked the Carbondale strip in days gone by, loading undergrads up with lifesaving carbs as they staggered out of the bars on their way back to the dorms.

According to the Wikipedia page, Bagel Toast is an Israeli snack consisting of various cheeses, vegetables, and sauces in a bagel, toasted in a sandwich press and served at cafes or in homes. Focusing my search on Israel netted me a few pages–a UK-based Kosher food blog with a sort of anything-goes recipe, an entry in the Wikibooks cookbook, a listicle about the best grilled cheese sandwiches in Tel Aviv that mentions one cafe’s bagel toast. I soon discovered that “Toast” was the word used in Israel for a grilled cheese sandwich or melt, and so bagel toast was simply describing a melt made with a bagel. The real insight though came from realizing that the plural of “toast” in Hebrew would be “toastim.”

That led me to a blog post describing the recipe for a bagel “Toastim” in a book called Israeli Soul: Easy, Essential, Delicious. Of course this book’s title was familiar to me, as I’d used it as a source when making Sabich back in 2018. Further delving into this rabbit hole led to a number of Youtube videos in languages I could not understand, with seemingly random ingredients being placed inside bagels, which were then pressed, cut into quarters, and served in cafes or simply displayed to advertise the sandwich presses; tourists wandering markets in Tel Aviv and Jaffa and Jerusalem, buying bagels and sandwiches and pastries and other treats; and even a convenience store commercial featuring a man with no pants.

Clearly this was no hoax. It is an actual sandwich, however ill advised the toasting of a bagel may be. That is, at least according to my friend the legendary food curmudgeon Kenny Z bagels are not to be toasted. Though I recently learned that he has issued a dispensation when it comes to bagel sandwiches.

Once you venture in to sandwich territory, you can even toast it if you want. Normal bagel rules don’t apply. For many people, it’s very freeing.

— Kenny Z (@kennethaz) January 31, 2019

The way the bagels were able to be compressed in the sandwich presses in these videos, though, told me that we weren’t dealing with bagels as I knew them. The sandwiches ended up being quite flat, a feat which would take industrial equipment to perform on a proper bagel in the US, and would likely result in something approaching diamond levels of hardness.

These bagels were different, visibly fluffier. Now, many bagels in the US are downright fluffy as well, but that is not how they’re *supposed* to be. Proper bagels, as brought over to the US by Polish Jews in the late 19th Century, are boiled before they’re baked, setting their exterior and minimizing oven spring, resulting in a denser, chewier bread. Searching for Israeli-style bagels led me to the Jerusalem bagel, an elongated sesame-seed bagel that is not boiled and may owe its existence as much or more to other ring-shaped sesame breads in the near east–such as Arab ka’ak or Turkish simit–as it does to European-style bagels.

Now the bagels I’d seen in the Youtube bagel toast videos were not as long as one’s forearm like these, but otherwise shared some of their characteristics–light fluffy crumb and a sesame seed coating. And according to Israeli soul, we’re on the right track looking at these bagels.

Toastim, Jerusalem bagels stuffed with sandwich ingredients and pressed like panini, are an Israeli café and coffee shop staple.

There was a recipe for the Jerusalem bagel in the Israeli Soul book, but I found myself more intrigued by another recipe that had been shared online by David Lebovitz, adapted from a book called The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis. As noted elsewhere, when European Jews migrated to the Levant in the days following World War II, they adopted local foodways in an attempt to rediscover or create anew the culture of their middle-eastern forebears. Many of the practices they adopted were Palestinian, and despite the subsequent decades of bloody conflict, the culture of Israel owes much to that of the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states. The Jerusalem bagel is both a Palestinian and Israeli snack, as Jerusalem is both an Israeli and Palestinian city.

Besides, I liked the way her recipe used diluted pomegranate molasses to stick the sesame seeds to the bread.

The bagels were lighter than I’m used to, though not quite as airy and fluffy as the Jerusalem bagels I’d seen in my research. Still, they made an excellent breakfast with some olive oil, za’atar, and hummus, and I enjoyed the slight hint of sweetness from the pomegranate-glazed sesame seeds.

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One of Israeli Soul’s suggested uses for the Jerusalem bagel was to make a sandwich of smoked salmon, labneh, and sliced avocado. Labneh is a type of soft spreadable cheese made from yogurt, in flavor and texture very much like a cream cheese.

While I had picked up some smoked sockeye salmon and labneh, I somehow managed to neglect the avocado. Without avocado, the sandwich ended up being very familiar.

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It’s basically the classic way of consuming a bagel, at least in my mind. But it’s not a Bagel Toast. To get closer to my target, I tried using one of the bagels to make a basic grilled cheese sandwich, with sliced Edam cheese.

Using a flat rather than ridged sandwich press, I compressed and heated the bagel and cheese until crisp and melty and flat.

The bagel didn’t crisp up quite as nicely as I thought it would; irregularities in the surface caused by sesame seeds kept it from having as full contact with the hot plates as I’d like. Still, the lightly nutty Edam and the slightly sweet bagel made a great combination, and a sort of consolation prize for the 13yo, who was not going to eat any of the bagel toasts we made with tomatoes or olives or any other vegetable matter.

The actual Bagel Toast recipe provided in Israeli Soul starts with a halved bagel, spread with a compound butter containing minced green olives.

Then it adds feta and sliced green olives on one half of the bagel, and sliced tomatoes with za’atar on the other.

Then it, too, spends some time in the sandwich press.

The thing about this sandwich is that with all the various sources of moisture inside it–the tomatoes , the feta, the olives, even the butter–I had a very difficult time getting it crisp on the outside. I spent a lot of the cook time mopping up juices that were expelled from the sandwich, and it took longer than anticipated as a result. Eventually, though, it too came out well-flattened and piping hot.

I had expected this sandwich to be intensely briny but despite the olive and feta combination the brine flavor was less powerful than I anticipated. As before, there was a touch of pomegranate sweetness present in every bite, accented by the fresh tomatoes. The olive and feta flavors were there, but they’d taken on a different character when heated, softer, less demanding of attention.

The next morning, I scrambled a couple eggs with some of the olive butter, toasted a bagel, and made a sandwich of the eggs with labneh and hummus.

Unfortunately, the bagel had been sitting out overnight wrapped only in a kitchen towel and was too stale to enjoy. I would need to make more bagels if I was to try another bagel toast. Since I had yet to make either the UK blogger’s version or the Wikibooks version, more bagels it was.

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This time I made the Israeli Soul recipe, and since I’ve had a hard time finding bread flour of any kind in stores lately, much less my preferred King Arthur brand, I used Janie’s Mill Artisanal Blend flour that I’d mail ordered to bridge the gap. This high-gluten whole-grain bread flour made a darker bread than I anticipated, but a far fluffier bagel than my previous attempt.

According to Helen at the Kosher food blog Family Friends Food, the most basic type of bagel toast is tomato sauce and cheese, a pizza bagel of sorts. I used a cheap canned pizza sauce and sliced Edam cheese.

While these bagels were lighter-crumbed and fluffier, the pressing process still squeezed quite a bit of the melting cheese out the sides of the bagel as it cooked.

I carefully transferred as much of the escaping cheese along with the bagel to the cutting board. As you can see, the bagel flattened nicely in the press, quite similar to the bagels I’d seen in the Youtube videos earlier.

I cut the bagel toast into 4 pieces, as this seems to be the standard way to serve a bagel toast. It also worked out nicely with my wife and two of our sons home at the time I made it.

It was good, but simple, and might have been more satisfying open-faced without the sandwich press, simply broiled to melt the cheese.

Other than that, the Family Friends Food blog doesn’t provide a set recipe, simply a list of ingredients that can be combined in various ways. Her list includes:

• tomato sauce (think pizza rather than ketchup)
• yellow cheese (a bit like cheddar)
• white cheese (bland)
• ‘salty’ cheese (vaguely like feta)
• humous
• grilled aubergine
• olives/pickles
• tuna (plain)
• spicy tuna (mixed with a fiery tomato sauce)
• sliced hardboiled egg
• sliced tomato
• harissa/schug/hot sauce
• amba (sweet-spicy mango sauce a bit like mango chutney)

So I selected a subset of these ingredients that I thought would go well together and whipped up another bagel toast.

First I chose feta cheese and flaked tuna

Next I added green olives and amba, an Indian-spiced green mango-based condimend popular in the middle east. You may remember it from our investigation of the Israeli sandwich Sabich.

Next I added hard-boiled eggs and grilled onions.

And I finished the sandwich with Edam cheese and the top bagel half. Again, once in the sandwich press the cheese escaped from the sandwich as it melted, creating a bubbling ring around the bagel.

Pressing a sandwich stacked this high is challenging. The sandwich press lid can be rotated on its arm to remain level; however, as it lowers, the arm also moves the lid laterally, which can cause the top half of the sandwich to slide to the side. I cut the sandwich into quarters again and offered it to the family. Only Damian and I partook though.

While the earlier sandwich containing feta and olives had a muted brininess, this one’s was accentuated by the salty tuna and the intense amba flavor. Damian commented facetiously that it seemed like a reprise of last month’s Arnold Palmer, with the egg and tuna combination. The connection hadn’t occurred to me. It wasn’t a bad sandwich, but this fish and cheese bagel will never replace smoked salmon and lox for me.

The recipe from the Wikibooks cookbook is… odd. I’ll reproduce the steps it provides below.

1. Cut the bagel in half.
2. Spread the Brindsah cheese (or the Feta cheese) on the half bagel.
3. Cover with several slices of hard cheese.

Once again, I used a combination of feta and Edam.

4. Add the corn and the sliced green olives.

Corn? I’ll be honest, corn did pop up in a few of the Bagel Toast videos I watched, but I’d hoped to avoid it. Oh well. I heated some frozen corn in the microwave.

5. Add several tomato slices and onion slices.

6. Pour ketchup and Thousand Island dressing on top.

I was surprised to discover I was out of Thousand Island dressing. I used Russian dressing instead, a common substitute, and one I prefer.

7. Cover the bagel with the other half of the bagel.
8. Pour more Thousand Island dressing on top of the bagel and put it into the grill.

More dressing on top of the sandwich? I’m billing Wikibooks for another sandwich press if this ruins it.

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9. Activate the grill.
10. Remove the bagel when all the cheese has melted and the outside is medium-dark brown and crispy, about two minutes.

9. Eat immediately.

The glaze of Russian dressing atop the bagel was the best part of this sandwich. I’d have liked it better with corned beef instead of corn though.

To sum up: Bagels are great! Jerusalem bagels, also pretty great. Bagels with cheese and other stuff cooked in a sandwich press: hit and miss. The best sandwich of this lot was the smoked salmon and labneh, which wasn’t a bagel toast at all. Still, I imagine there are many very good combinations that I did not try. If Israeli-style bagel toast is something you enjoy, please let us know your favorites in the comments!