Rainbow-bright bagels sell like hot cakes in New York

Yet another new food craze has overtaken New York, and insanely, this time it’s rainbow bagels.

New Yorkers are forsaking traditional bagels standbys like sesame, poppy and onion to stand in line for hours at The Bagel Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for bagels swirled with eye-popping colors.

“I am doing what people said could never be done,” Scot Rossillo, owner of The Bagel Store, told Business Insider about his psychedelic-looking bagels.

Rossillo, has actually been making these colorful rolls with holes for 20 years, but it is only lately that they have gained widespread attention. Little did the baker know that his personal therapeutic art project of dyeing and swirling dough would turn into a huge culinary trend — at least for now.

“It’s kind of nuts how popular they became almost overnight. I think it has a lot to do with Instagram; they’re colorful and fun and almost made for the app,” said Devra Ferst, senior editor at Tasting Table, a website and newsletter for culinary enthusiasts, about these rainbow bagels. (As former food editor at the Jewish Daily Forward, Ferst knows her bagels.)

Ferst told The Times of Israel she thought this interest in rainbow bagels is likely part of an uptick in interest in bagels in general. The opening of Sadelle’s (a SoHo restaurant that specializes in traditional appetizing foods and has a glass-enclosed bagel and bread bakery) and the recent reboot of the legendary Lower East Side bialy and bagel store Kossar’s are also part of this bagel resurgence.

Rossillo claims he and one of his assistant bakers are the only people in the world who know how to make rainbow bagels. He also claims it’s a true art form driven by creativity and passion.

“A tremendous amount of discipline is required to make the world’s most beautiful bagel,” the bagel Picasso told Business Insider.

There is apparently no specific recipe involved (or at least that Rossillo is willing to share). However, it looks from videos of Rossillo and his assistant baker making the bagels, that the process involves adding food dyes in neon colors to sweetened dough. Separate mounds are made in each color, and then they are flattened and layered to create a giant stack. Once all the desired colored layers are in place, the baker cuts through the dough stack to create large slices that are then further cut into strips to be expertly rolled and shaped into rings.

‘A tremendous amount of discipline is required to make the world’s most beautiful bagel’

Rossillo has created a variety of new spreads to shmear onto his invention. His “funfetti” cream cheese with colored sprinkles has quickly emerged as the classic pairing for the rainbow bagel. The idea being, of course, that you can never have enough artificial color in what you eat.

Despite the hype, Ferst has yet to try a rainbow bagel.

“When it comes to bagels, I’m a purist, so a sweet bagel isn’t what I want,” she said.

“I appreciate the chefs and bakers who are always pushing themselves, but I also think that there are people who are trying to come up with the next one-hit wonder of the baking world, to replicate the success of the cronut [the croissant-donut hybrid that was wildly popular a while back] and to do that, lots of people are mashing up things that shouldn’t necessarily be mashed up,” she said.

Ferst is open to bagel innovation, but within limits. She’s a fan of Sadelle’s “Everything 2.0” bagel. It has the usual poppy and sesame seeds, garlic, onion and salt, but its added twist is the less-is-more addition of fennel and caraway seeds.