{"id":56890,"date":"2025-11-19T23:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T23:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/56890\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T23:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T23:50:07","slug":"starship-bagel-used-ingenious-method-to-win-best-bagel-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/56890\/","title":{"rendered":"Starship Bagel used ingenious method to win Best Bagel award"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dallas’ award-winning Starship Bagel<\/a> racked up another award on November 16, when the bagel shop won<\/a> top prize in the 2025 New York BagelFest<\/a>, an annual bagel competition drawing two dozen bagel purveyors from around the globe.<\/p>\n

Starship won “Best Bagel” \u2014 the top award that the festival bestows \u2014 as well as awards<\/a> for Best New York-style bagel, Best Showmanship, Best Schmear, and Most Creative.<\/p>\n

This marked the third year Starship competed, following 2023<\/a> when they first won Best Bagel<\/a>, and again in 2024<\/a> when they won Best Schmear<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Competing in another city in the food & beverage realm is challenging, as it takes the operator out of their usual zone, away from the processes and equipment they rely on every day \u2014 and especially in a category as temperamental as baking, which involves unpredictable factors such as yeast, a living thing, and water, whose makeup famously differs from city to city.<\/p>\n

But this year, Starship Bagel founder Oren Salomon devised a formula that, on paper, might seem risky, but ended up being a wild success.<\/p>\n

“We took a huge gamble and it paid off,” Salomon says. “We made the winning bagels in Lewisville a week before the event.”<\/p>\n

Wait, what?<\/p>\n

“We par-baked them, froze them, and brought them to New York on dry ice \u2014 then finished them off in an oven I purchased in New York and brought to the Citifield venue,” he says. “We turned an ‘away game’ into home field advantage.”<\/p>\n

The word “par-baked” means partially baked, a process where bread or pizza dough is baked for part of the total cooking time, then frozen to be popped back into the oven for a final finishing bake.<\/p>\n

“Par-baked” can be a dirty word in the baking world since it’s a technique most often employed by supermarket chains and big companies, not the little guy. Your typical “artisan” baker baking a loaf of crusty artisan bread is not par-baking.<\/p>\n

But Salomon says that the technique proved to be ideal for bagels.<\/p>\n

“Bagels lend themselves to it and it\u2019s a very bagel-specific technique,” he says. “Par-baking actually makes a superior product and that\u2019s exactly why we wanted to enter it into the competition.”<\/p>\n

For bakery nerds: They first baked their bagels in a rotating deck oven, to give the bagels a crisp bottom. After freezing, they did their second bake in a convection oven, which gave the bagels a nice crispy top.<\/p>\n

\"Starship Starship Bagel Starship Bagel <\/p>\n

“It’s a hybrid approach with results only made possible by using two ovens,” Salomon says.<\/p>\n

They’ll continue to experiment with this technique at their three locations in Lewisville, downtown Dallas, and North Dallas.<\/p>\n

“Now we\u2019re going to roll out parbaked bagels to all of our stores so we can serve hot bagels all day long,” he says. “It\u2019s a transformation that will allow us to increase quality, freshness, availability while reducing costs and our carbon footprint by reducing our need to deliver to our satellites multiple times per day.”<\/p>\n

It may not be enough to keep up with what they anticipate will be a huge burst in business in the upcoming week. Their win got major coverage not only in the hometown press but also nationally. (The New York Post<\/a>: “Schmear campaign! The best bagel shop in America isn’t in New York, it’s in Texas \u2014 worse, the judges were mostly New Yorkers.”)<\/p>\n

Since they’ve returned from the competition, they’ve been slammed, and Salomon anticipates possible shortages this weekend and going into the holiday.<\/p>\n

“We look forward to feeding all these new faces, we just hope they come with proper expectations for the moment,” Salomon says.<\/p>\n

Starship Bagel has enoyed a meteoric rise since Salomon opened<\/a> the first location in Lewisville in 2021. A second location opened<\/a> in downtown Dallas in 2023, and a third opened<\/a> in North Dallas in 2024.<\/p>\n

For this year’s Bagelfest, they brought a big menu of items including:<\/p>\n

French onion pre-soup: onion bagel with French onion schmear topped with melted Gruyere and chivesBeer Schmear: poppy bagel with hops-infused schmear topped with candied orange and barley malt drizzleMushroom Shawarma: Sesame bagel topped with seasoned mushrooms, tahini, and Israeli saladSchmeara Masala: garlic bagel with Makhani sauce schmear, topped with cherry tomatoes and cilantroUbe For You, Bae: plain bagel with ube schmear topped with toasted coconut flakesBlack Garlic Chili Crisp: Italian bagel with black galic schmear topped with kimchi cucumber and chili crisp<\/p>\n

Winning the Best Bagel award in New York was a coup since New York is generally considered to be the bagel capital of the world, with many aficionados insisting that the secret ingredient is New York water.<\/p>\n

“We won with Lewisville water!” Salomon says.<\/p>\n