Bagels have holes primarily because of how they’re cooked. The hole ensures the dough cooks evenly all the way through, since bagels are boiled before they’re baked. Without it, the dense, chewy dough would end up underdone in the center. The hole also turned out to be incredibly useful for transporting and selling bagels, which helped cement it as a defining feature of the bread.
The Hole Is Really About Even Cooking
Bagel dough is made with high-gluten flour, which gives it that distinctively dense, chewy texture. But dense dough creates a problem: it’s hard to cook uniformly, especially when the first step is boiling. The hole exposes more surface area to both the boiling water and the oven heat, so the bagel cooks through without leaving a raw, doughy center. Think of it like the difference between trying to cook a solid disc of meat versus a ring-shaped one. The ring shape simply heats more evenly.
This is also why bagels develop their signature crust. More exposed surface area means more of the dough contacts the boiling water, which gelatinizes the starches on the outside and creates that shiny, slightly chewy skin before the bagel ever hits the oven. A solid roll boiled the same way wouldn’t get the same result.
Street Vendors Made the Hole Famous
While the hole exists for cooking purposes, it turned out to be a brilliant design feature for selling bagels. In the 14th century, German bagel sellers threaded their goods onto wooden dowels, making it easy to carry dozens of bagels between towns. Selling bagels was typically a one-person operation with no storefront, so a portable pole loaded with bagels was the entire business model.
When European Jewish immigrants brought bagels to North America in the 19th century, the tradition continued. New York bakeries strung bagels on ropes to deliver them to delis and markets. This practice lasted well into the 20th century, only fading when stricter food-handling regulations arrived in the 1970s. So while transport wasn’t the original reason for the hole, it was a convenient coincidence that helped bagels become one of the most recognizable breads in the world.
Not All Bagel Holes Are the Same Size
The two most famous bagel styles, New York and Montreal, have noticeably different holes. A classic New York bagel has a hole roughly 1 inch across. It’s a big, heavy, salty, chewy bagel where the hole is almost an afterthought. Montreal bagels, by contrast, have a hole closer to 1¾ inches across. They’re smaller overall, sweeter (the dough is dipped in a honey-water bath before baking), and crunchier. The larger hole gives them an even higher ratio of crust to interior, which contributes to that crispier texture.
Bagels in general have also gotten bigger over the decades. When Lender’s first introduced frozen bagels, they weighed about 2 ounces. Today, a bagel from a chain like Dunkin’ Donuts averages over 4 ounces, more than double that original size. As the bagel grew, the hole often shrank proportionally, which is why some modern bagels barely have a hole at all. Depending on size and ingredients, a single bagel can range from 160 to 400 calories before you add anything to it.
Why Bialys Don’t Need a Hole
The easiest way to understand why the bagel’s hole matters is to look at its closest relative: the bialy. Bialys are flat, circular yeast rolls with a shallow depression on top instead of a hole punched all the way through. The key difference is that bialys are only baked, never boiled. Without that boiling step, there’s no need for the extra surface area a hole provides. Bialy dough is also lighter and puffier, full of air pockets when you slice one open, so it doesn’t have the same problem with uneven cooking that dense bagel dough does.
The boiling step is really what makes a bagel a bagel. It’s what demands the hole, creates the crust, and produces that chewy interior. Remove the boil, and you get something closer to a regular bread roll, where a hole would just be a waste of dough.