bagels vs. baguettes

I'm no expert on the making and eating of bagels, so I won't get too long-winded about them in this post. The bagels I've eaten have tended to be dense and heavy—you get a lot of bang for the buck. When someone makes a sandwich using a bagel as the bread, a single sandwich is generally enough for me; I can't even imagine trying to eat a foot-long sub whose bread is as dense as a bagel. If you toast a bagel, or split it in half and pan-fry the halves with butter, you're left with a little torus of pure carbohydrate joy. A bagel is fun.

A well-made baguette is also fun, although in a completely different way. If a bagel is masculine in nature, a baguette is feminine: its tough, crusty, and often-flaky outside is in no way a reflection of the delicate subtlety that characterizes its inside. A bagel is dense enough to use as a weapon; a baguette's crust would shatter if you employed it as a baseball bat.

And that's what I've come to conclude about bagels and baguettes: they're polar opposites. A freshly baked baguette is a combination of two principal textures—a brittle exterior and a gossamer interior. Bagels, by contrast, are unsophisticated creatures: they have no crust to speak of—just a smooth-boiled exterior—and their texture is consistent through and through. With a bagel, what you see is what you get—as obvious as a penis dangling out of an open fly. A baguette, meanwhile, hides its subtle interior inside a forbidding, shielded exterior: think of its crust as the labia majora, gatekeepers for the soft, warm, moist, and steamy labia minora.

I love both bagels and baguettes, but I have to admit that I love baguettes more. If you were to put both types of bread in front of me, and then you asked me to choose, I'd choose the baguette every single time. To reiterate, though: I love bagels, too. I would never say no to one. But I'd say yes faster to a baguette.


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