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Even though Americans have their bagels with all kinds of fixings nowadays, the bagel – cream cheese – lox triade remains the classic combination. It has been the feature of New York Jews' Sunday breakfasts since at least the 1930s. When Kraft Foods, who already owned the Philadelphia cream-cheese brand, acquired the Lender brothers' bagel business in 1984, they even organized a grand marketing wedding ceremony, where the bride was a cream-cheese-filled tub and the groom was an eight-foot (over 2 m) bagel. Two years later, just one of the factories Kraft Foods had bought from the Lenders churned out a million holey bread rolls per day.<ref>Balinska, ''op. cit.'', p. 174–176</ref>
This classic set is what Magda, co-author of the blog [https://www.facebook.com/LowcySmakow/ Łowcy Smaków] (Taste Flavour Hunters), and I decided to make from scratch for breakfast (some advance preparation was needed). Magda baked the bagels and I made the rest.
My friend first made the dough from wheat flour (450 g), water (250 g) and instant yeast (1 packet), and after some kneading she left it the fridge for one night. Next morning, she formed the bagels, let the dough rise for an hour under a piece of cloth and then boiled them in water with some honey and salt. All that was left to do afterwards was to sprinkle the bagels with sesame seeds and pop them into an oven heated preheated to 200 °C for some 20 minutes.
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As for the Jewish lox, it tends to be replaced with smoked salmon today, but the real deal is more like the Scandinavian ''gravlax'', that is, salmon pickled in salt and buried in the groundto marinate. So this is what I did: I mixed equal amounts of coarse salt and sugar, as well as a bunch of dill and a few crushed peppercorns and juniper berries. I spread the mixture on both sides of a salmon fillet and then – no, I didn't bury it; I just wrapped it in plastic foil and left in the fridge for two days. Then I unpacked it, gently brushed away the salt-and-sugar mixture, and cut the lox into paper-thin slices.
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