![]() ![]() ![]() In present-day Brooklyn, where a pound of cream cheese costs somewhere between $5 and $8, I moved on to Bagel Pub, a bagel spot in Park Slope and Crown Heights that I tend to avoid specifically because of how much cream cheese it uses on its bagels. Cream cheese began as a decadent, upscale invention, and it sold for $0.30 a pound in 1889 (for comparison, Muenster sold for $0.13 a pound, Marx wrote). What does he call it? He calls it cream cheese,” said Jeffrey A Marx, a rabbi at the Santa Monica Synagogue who has written extensively about the history of cream cheese, to Mashable. “He’s curdled the milk, pressed all the liquid out, and now he puts cream into it. But a grocer called Park & Tilford approached him and asked if he could make an even more decadent cheese that they could sell for more money. In the 1870s, a farmer named William Lawrence was making Neufchatel cheese – a rich French cheese. ![]() “We continue to see elevated and sustained demand across a number of categories where we compete … As more people continue to eat breakfast at home and use cream cheese as an ingredient in easy desserts, we expect to see this trend continue.”Ĭream cheese’s roots aren’t actually in New York City, but rather in upstate New York. Though no bagel shop I visited demonstrated the urgent scarcity in the Times story, Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe’s paltry cream cheese offering – about a quarter of an inch of the spread – was the most concerning bellwether I saw.Ī spokesperson for Kraft Heinz, which owns the Philadelphia brand, provided a quite vague explanation of the cream cheese shortage to the Times: ![]() Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe with 1/4 inch of cream cheese. I left with my plain bagel with scallion cream cheese (at some point in this lo-fi experiment I decided I should adhere as closely as possible to something resembling consistency – for science) and came home to measure the cream cheese, as one does. Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe, my neighborhood shop on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, was out of a couple varieties of cream cheese when I visited, but nobody could tell me if it was strictly supply chain-related. The sesame bagel with scallion cream cheese we picked up from Ess-a-bagel this week had roughly ¾ of an inch of cream cheese nestled between the bagel halves, a hefty amount of dairy for even the strongest stomach.įollowing my important bagel jaunt to Manhattan, I turned my attention to some Brooklyn bagel shops. One bagel shop that seems to be having no trouble keeping a healthy amount of schmear on their bagels is Ess-a-bagel, located on Third Avenue. Absolute Bagel had 2.5 ounces, and outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s favorite, Bagel Hole, served 1.7 ounces of cream cheese.Īn Ess-a-Bagel bagel with 3/4 of an inch of cream cheese. In an article for Serious Eats in 2014, writer Max Falkowitz took cream cheese samples from six New York City bagel shops and found a range from 0.7 ounces, at Black Seed in Brooklyn, to 3.9 ounces, at Brooklyn Bagel in Manhattan. Others have observed this trend over the years. These bystanders aren’t alone in their criticism. “Let’s be real: the cream cheese shortage is entirely self-inflicted from NYC bagel shops loading each bagel with a pound of cream cheese,” historian Jake Anbinder tweeted. “Have they considered not putting a pound on each bagel?” Joel Weirtheimer, a former associate staff secretary for Barack Obama, tweeted. News of the cream cheese shortage had immediately spawned debate on social media about the sometimes dangerous levels of cream cheese found on the average bagel in the city. In fact, there was about half an inch of cream cheese – enough that this reporter had to scrape off a fair amount before taking a bite. We ordered our bagel at the 107-year-old shop’s counter on Houston Street and didn’t notice a marked decrease in the availability of cream cheese. The first establishment on our list: a classic New York stalwart, a plain bagel with scallion schmear from Russ & Daughters. A Russ and Daughters bagel with 3/8th of an inch of cream cheese. ![]()
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