The English Muffin Bagel at Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Co.

[Photographs: Adam Kuban]

Let your eye wander at the Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Co. location on Ditmars Boulevard and you'll see a separate sign on the wall, printed on a sheet of letter-size paper and hastily tacked up to the right of the menu board, that advertises "English muffin bagels."

Imagining the cranny-rich, spongy nature of an actual English muffin, I figured I'd give this bagel a shot this morning. Naturally, I ordered it toasted with lots of butter — oh, and egg and cheese.

Sure, adding this stuff might be taking bagel so far from its intended purpose so as to render it "not a bagel" anymore, but I figured I wanted make this a sort of mashup between a New York bagel and an Egg McMuffin.

The verdict? Well, the English muffin bagel doesn't have as open a crumb—doesn't have as many nooks and crannies—as an actual English muffin. So it's quite a bit more dense than what you'd expect. Although, it still does retain an English muffin-y flavor, thanks mostly to the requisite dusting of cornmeal.

While the English muffin–enhanced absorbency did soak up all the butter applied to my EM bagel, it was quite dry—even with one scrambled egg and melted cheese. I kept thinking that a traditional English muffin's thinness is pretty much the ideal configuration for this type of bread, since there's just enough there to act as fat sponge but not so much as to overwhelm.

This bagel might be a better option if you were going with two eggs, cheese, and bacon.

Brooklyn Bagel & Coffee Company

3509 Ditmars Boulevard, Astoria NY 11105 (35th/36th; map) 3505 Broadway, Astoria NY 11106 (35th Street; map) 286 Eighth Avenue, New York NY 10001 (23rd/24th; map)
bkbagel.com

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