Meet the baker bringing 'proper' New York-style bagels to the UK
Within days of baking her first batch of bagels in her mum’s kitchen in 2020, Francesca Goldhill had created a name for her bagel business, designed its branding and set up its social media accounts. Impulsive, perhaps, admits the founder of Bagels + Schmear, but that’s how convinced the then 24-year-old was that other people were craving her favourite comfort food as much as she was.
Four years on, she employs 12 people at her bakery in Hertfordshire, she’s made bagels for popstars and A-listers, and she’s the sole supplier to Fortnum & Mason’s bagel bar in London.
“Founders often say that the secret to a successful business is finding a problem that needs solving,” Francesca says. “My problem was that we were in lockdown and I really wanted a proper bagel.”
A “proper” bagel, she explains, is a New York bagel. It’s the sort she fell in love with during childhood trips to visit her dad’s sister, Anne, in Long Island and then devoured while she was working in Manhattan after university.
“I went to a Jewish school in London and would have an egg salad bagel every day for lunch,” she says. “At weekends, we’d get smoked salmon bagels from traditional Jewish delis. But New York bagels are completely different. Where the English version is sweeter and chewier, a New York bagel is crustier on the outside, pillowy on the inside, less sweet and twice the size.”
Schmear is the other vital component of the NYC bagel, its name adapted from the Yiddish for “smear”. There are 24 varieties of this cream-cheese spread at Bagels + Schmear, where queues form every weekend in front of the bustling open kitchen. “We whip full-fat cream cheese to get the fluffy texture,” Francesca explains. “Some of our flavours are typical of New York, such as scallion – I’ve even kept the American word for ‘spring onion’ – but there’s also Marmite (my favourite) and olive oil and rosemary, inspired by a British Sunday roast.”
Other than making cookies as a child with her mum, Karen, and sister, Olivia, Francesca had no experience of baking until that fateful day in 2020. “I typed ‘New York bagel’ into Google, found a recipe and followed it,” she says. “I posted a picture of my first batch on Instagram and friends started messaging, saying, ‘Make some for me.’” As a digital marketer in the food industry – she was working from home for an Italian restaurant chain – Francesca spotted the brand potential immediately.
During the six months before Bagels + Schmear started trading, Francesca spent every spare minute mixing, kneading, shaping, boiling and baking bagels. “I’d log off from work and go straight into the kitchen to perfect my recipe,” she says. “I’ve watched every YouTube video there is about bagel-making; I’d pause and zoom in on videos from my favourite New York bagel shops to try to see what their oven temperature was.”
She was obsessed, she admits. But as much as she was driven by a vision, she was also seeking escape from a deep grief. At the end of 2019, her aunt Anne, with whom she’d spent so many formative New York holidays, had taken her own life. “During lockdown, I had too much time to sit with my thoughts and my mental health was suffering,” Francesca says. “Bagels + Schmear was the thing that got me through it; it created some excitement for all of us during a really bleak time.”
Francesca launched Bagels + Schmear in December 2020: she’d do her marketing job Monday to Friday, then make bagels at the weekend, delivering them locally and selling them from the doorstep. She left her job in April 2021, outgrew her mum’s kitchen within months and began the search for a commercial bakery: “When I wrote my business plan in 2020, I predicted I’d have a shop within five years. Then I found the perfect premises and it came with a shop. It was too good an opportunity to miss.”
She spent all her savings and several months kitting out the former pharmacy at Battlers Green Farm into a commercial bakery, shop and takeaway. At this shopping village on a working farm, where her neighbours include a butcher, greengrocer, fishmonger, fashion boutiques and beauty salon, Francesca and her team bake thousands of bagels each week using strong Canadian bread flour milled by Marriage’s in Essex.
Once mixed, rolled and shaped – using the traditional method of wrapping a rolled log of dough around the hand before tearing it off and sealing it – the bagels are proved overnight and boiled in a solution of water and barley-malt
extract (for colour and sweetness) before baking. “We time our boil to the second,” Francesca says. “Boiling is the point where bread becomes a bagel. It gelatinises the dough, which gives you the crust: the longer you boil, the thicker the crust. It’s also what makes the bagel sticky enough so when you dip it in sesame and poppy seeds before baking, they stay on.”
Customers can build their own bagels or choose from a menu of speciality sandwiches, including The Classic: kosher smoked salmon (from Goldstein Salmon Curers), plain schmear, tomatoes, red onion, capers, lemon and black pepper. This is the bagel that was laid on for actor James Norton, singer Dua Lipa and a room full of theatre critics at the Harold Pinter Theatre in March 2023. “We still talk about that night; it was unbelievable,” says Francesca of the commission to make 800 bagels for the press night of A Little Life.
Two months earlier, she’d had an email from Fortnum & Mason, asking whether she’d be interested in providing bagels and schmear for its new bagel bar: “My legs gave way when I read it.”
Despite her successes, Francesca still fights the creep of imposter syndrome as a newcomer within a trade that can be rather exclusive. “In London, getting a good bagel can depend on knowing which Jewish deli round the corner has been baking them for generations,” she says.
“In New York, bagels are for everyone and that’s the culture I wanted to recreate. Whenever I’m having a wobble, I look at the people from all walks of life lining up to eat our bagels. It makes me really proud.”
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