The Unvegan

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To the Salt Stick, With Love

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It may be phallic, but it’s the best kind of phallic.

To many people, the bagel is the king of breakfast. It’s like an evolution of toast, similar, yet greatly superior. And the best of those who love the bagel bow down to the salt bagel, the king of all bagels. It adds a perfect amount of flavor that goes great with cream cheese, especially strawberry cream cheese. But why strawberry cream cheese? Well, combining the sweet of the cream cheese with the salt of the bagel creates a perfect balance unparalleled by any other food in the world. Ever.

But is the salt bagel perfect? No, far from it. While bagels are delicious, they have one major flaw. That flaw is obvious to anyone who has ever attempted to shmear cream cheese across the surface of the bagel. The hole. This hole sucks up perfectly good cream cheese, rendering the bagel an imperfect medium for shmearing. Enter the Salt Stick. The Salt Stick is the salt bagel perfected. It is little more than an unrolled salt bagel, but that unraveling opens up a world of delight. The Salt Stick can be cut open, toasted and shmeared perfectly without concern over loss of cream cheese. Alternatively, it can be easily dipped into cream cheese, saving the lucky consumer from the effort of shmearing in the first place.

But where can you find the Salt Stick? Certainly not in LA. In fact, for a city with such a huge Jewish population, there is a surprising lack of good bagels at all. Few things bother me more than cutting open a bagel and discovering massive air pockets and a doughy interior. Bagels were not meant to be this way. Bagels are meant to be dense and not just a glorified English Muffin with a hole. To the best of my knowledge, the Salt Stick hardly exists beyond the borders of the Detroit area in Michigan. Local bagel places like Detroit Bagel and New York Bagel are always stocked with Salt Sticks. It is there that the Salt Stick flourishes, waiting for an opportunity to shmear its perfection across all the land. And it is there that I have to return to consume the Salt Stick.