Blaze Pizza Founder Brad Kent On Why He's Pivoting From Pizza To Bagels - Exclusive Interview

In your opinion, what makes the perfect bagel?

Well, because I've been playing with bagels longer than pizza, I've been doing it since the early 2000s, and it's so many steps, and it's really about the end product and the steps that lead to that end product. Which means extremely high-quality flour that has a really good flavor. Because, unlike pizza, which is a higher amount of water-to-flour ratio, bagels have a higher flour-to-water ratio than a lot of bread. So the flour has to taste really good. So that's important. You've got to use some of the classic ingredients that are in a bagel to make it taste like a bagel. It should be a slightly sweet bread, typically sweetened with malt syrup. So you add malted barley or malted wheat to give it that flavor, which is the same flavor you get in really good beer, you would also get in really good bread, and bagels seem to be a little bit on the higher side of malt. So it's a malty bread product.

It should have the right chew in the crumb where then it has a give. And if you have dentures, I'm hoping that it wouldn't pull them out, but that it would give them a little bit of a fight ... It should have a natural crunch that shouldn't need to be enhanced by being toasted. However, as much as like in the Neapolitan Pizza world, you'd say "I would never add oil to my dough." Or, "I would never add salt to my dough." There's these rules that are hard and fast. Like in the bagel world, you would never toast the bagel. A really good bagel that's toasted, I think it's even better.

So I think it's something that should also toast well. And this one's going to be one of those things, people are going to go, "Wait a minute. This is not a bagel guy, this is like a pizza guy saying that it's okay to put pineapple up on a pizza." No. I think it's okay to toast a bagel. And I think that it should be hand-shaped. I think looking at a bagel, part of that experience of bagel eating and bagel enjoyment, is appreciating how unique each bagel is. In the fine-dining world, you try to have uniformity by having this incredible skill as a chef.

And there's been a movement lately to make things perfectly imperfect ... which is this dichotomy now of beliefs. Bagel I think, is this perfectly imperfect thing. So it might be, that's why it's this perfect food for today because you have to have that skill set of a very good chef and a very good bread maker. But you have to have something that a really good bread maker...doesn't always have, and that's this culinary grit where you wing it. You adjust things as the day sees fit in a culinary way versus in a scientific baker's way. I think that pizza dough, I think a high-quality pizza dough is more bread baker science, and I think that a good bagel is more chef science. So there's a slight difference between the two. So that's why it's hard to do both. And I think that bagels are a much harder thing to figure out than a pizza.

Do you think there's any truth that New York City water affects taste and texture?

Yes. And I didn't used to believe this until I started Blaze Pizza, and we opened restaurants around the countr,y and I realized that water is not just two Hs and an O. It's also a series of minerals, and also it has a pH. PH and minerality of water plays a critical role in gluten formation and in flavor. So yes, the water impacts taste because it's an ingredient in the dough. It impacts the flavor. Absolutely the flavor of anything that it's in. In soup, and in breads and bagels and pizzas, water definitely has a taste. But that doesn't mean you can't make great bagels with water from California, if you have the right level of water filtration in place to make your water taste good. So now you've addressed the flavor, but you didn't address the minerals or the pH. Minerals and pH of water impact gluten formation, which impact the chewiness and texture of your finished product.

The protein quality and the protein content of flour impacts the texture of your finished product. So when you mix water with flour, you develop gluten, when you mix those in a certain way, and you ferment a certain way and bake a certain way and boil a certain way, you get a texture. So if you make adjustments to your formulation, your process, your types of flour, the protein quality and the protein content of your flour, you can get a bagel that matches the quality and texture of a New York bagel without using New York water.

Why are you still doing pizza if your focus is on bagels?

Well, I love pizza, and I think I'm good at it. And it started out... It was a big business decision to do bagels and pizzas at the same place because the bagel business is a really hard business to succeed in financially because you're closed more than half the day. And your rent is for the entire day. And in Los Angeles where rents are so high, workers' compensation is so high. And all these insurances are so high. The cost of doing business is insane. You've got to be either charging an arm and a leg to make a living, which I don't think is fair because I don't want to just have that taste of a true bagel in the mouths and memories of the elite, I want that in the mouths and the memories of everyone. I want to democratize a food that was brought over by peasants. A bagel shouldn't be five dollars.

A bagel should be something that people can afford. A bagel shouldn't be made with bleached flour or from a mix. It should be made with flour that was grown by farmers that give a damn about the planet and about making flour that tastes like wheat. Wheat tastes good if it's good wheat. That's what I want to do. And the only way to do that is I have to have a business model that makes sense financially. And I had to introduce another day part of sales. I can make a really good slice. There's not enough good slice places in LA either. Why don't I use the same equipment, use the same incredible quality ingredients, same flour, use it as a different ratio, I know how to do that. Ferment it a different amount of time, mix it a different way and make pizza dough and make the best slice that LA's seen.

So why can't I have both of those at the same place? I don't know how hard it is yet to deliver. I'm freaked out, frankly, about how I'm going to figure how to do this. I've got doughs that are fermenting three-plus days, and I've got to walk in as big as my space will handle. So somehow I've got to have to manage several days of dough, including servicing my guests and dealing with 11 different suppliers, because the quality of ingredients that I'm trying to get that have that level of integrity, where they're grown either organically or regenerative organically, humanely, farmers that take care of not just the land, but also the people that work there. That level, I can't just get the stuff that every distributor's selling. I have to work directly with farmers, I have to work with a number of different distributors, I have to buy in bulk. I built a second story in a one-story building so I can store my wheat. 

So when I order it, I have to order 2,000 pounds at a time. And so I needed a place to store all that wheat. And I can only get deliveries once a week from that supplier. So how do I do that? And 2,000 pounds ... I'm busy, I'm actually going to go to 2,000 pounds a week. So how do I store even 2,000 pounds a week?

Could you briefly talk about regenerative organics for our readers?

It's overbearing. Ask my wife, "Will you stop talking about it already." All right. So regenerative is something that's new to me. It's not anything new to the planet. It's been something that ... It's the way that farming was done until industrialized farming was introduced. What industrialized farming did was introduce mono-crop or a single thing growing on a plot of land. So it'll be crops of corn every year planting the corn, not rotating crops. Like I heard about when I was in elementary school, I was a child of the '70s. But back then, we used to talk about rotating crops, and just having animals on the farm. And when you have a bunch of living things in one place, you have an ecosystem. You don't have an ecosystem when you have all these chemical inputs, like soybeans are a living organism, and then you've got some bugs, but we don't like the bugs so we're going to put in pesticides on those.

And we don't like these weeds, we're going to put herbicides on those. So therefore the natural bugs and plants that would be on that land are not producing all their byproducts that would normally feed the soybeans. So then they have to put chemical inputs into the land, which would be fertilizers that are unnatural. And what happens over time is, you end up eroding the soil. And we've heard of the Dust Bowl in school, and you've heard of soil erosion, and you've heard of farms losing the nutrients in the soil. So you end up not being able to farm there anymore. And that's because you robbed the soil of everything that was in there, you've taken away all the life forms that were there because you're spraying pesticides, herbicides. And even the chemicals that are supposedly giving health to the plants, but they're only giving them the nutrients to make the plants grow big and green and what helps them get to market.

And they're eliminating the whole ecosystem that is necessary to keep building soil back. What regenerative farming does is it actually brings back the soil's health, and it actually builds topsoil. And by building topsoil and by building soil health, what you do is you create a much more resilient environment for drought conditions, for extreme weather conditions like floods, because the ground is more porous. It'll absorb more water without flooding and rinsing away all the seeds. It'll hold more water when it's dry so that the plants will actually thrive, and you won't have to add all of those chemicals because all of those are happening naturally by natural competition of plants and organisms.

And not only are you doing all of this good stuff, but you're sequestering at the same time, a tremendous amount of carbon from the environment to help reduce, and at some point, hopefully, eliminate climate change. The really big objective of people that are in this movement. And the only way to do it, is we've got to get more farmers onto this stuff. And the way we get more farmers onto that is we got to get more restaurants on it. The way we get more restaurants on it is you got to make food that people will order and eat. I can't do this by selling $300 a plate, five-star meals to 1% of the population. I have to do it by selling food to the masses, and the best food to sell these masses is the most democratized food of all, which is peasant foods, pizzas and bagels. That's why I came up with Bagel + Slice.

And it doesn't stop with the plants. The ecosystem has animals on it. So there's farm animals. There's chickens that are providing nitrogen for the soil, that are also producing eggs. There are cows that are eating stuff that we can't digest, that are also making fertilizer. And they're also walking around and aerating the soil by just walking on it. So there's no tilling on regenerative farms. So that's the kind of dairy products that we'll be sourcing, that's the kind of meat product we'll be sourcing. That's the kind of agricultural products and even the fish that we'll be sourcing for our salmon.

Could you go through the process of making a traditional bagel from start to finish?

So [the] bagel-making process starts by mixing flour with water and malt and some other stuff, not a lot of stuff in a mixer. And then you can either pre-ferment, or not. After it's mixed, then you typically ferment it either right on the table, or you can refrigerate and ferment it even further. Then it gets divided into ... Some people divide into balls and then they make into snakes, and then they make those snakes into rings, and some people go right from the mixer into the bagel shape. But I'm sorry for not giving you a much more succinct answer. But you mix dough, you ferment it, you shape it into rings, it gets fermented overnight in a refrigerator. That tends to be a classic New York-style bagel process as it gets fermented overnight in the bagel form. Then it gets offloaded from that refrigerated form into a pool of boiling water, typically sweetened with malt syrup.

So there's additional malt there. And after it boils for some time, it gets removed and placed onto wet boards. The reason it goes onto wet boards, is the boards will burn if they're not wet when they go into the oven. And the reason it goes onto boards, they get placed upside down on the boards, is because bagels are tremendously sticky. And if you were to try to bake them directly on the floor of an oven, they would adhere and you wouldn't be able to get them off. So you have to wait for the bottoms to dry before you flip them off the boards and bake them now with the top side facing up with the dry bottoms until they're finished baking. What you'll see with a number of places in LA that are doing bagels. The untraditional way is you'll see seeds on the top and bottom.

That is one way to tell if a bagel is a true bagel or not. If it's seeded top and bottom, some bagels in New York are seeded top and bottom because people like the bottom and the top to have seeds. Because if you're eating an open-face bagel sandwich, you want the top half in the bottom half to give the same experience. So I'm not saying that always is the telltale sign, but it's a really good indication that something might be fishy. So look around at those places that are seeding tops and bottoms, they probably are baking on parchment line cheap pan, not using bagel boards, not adhering to the traditional standards. And that's really important to me because I need to keep Jewish bagel-making tradition alive. And the only way to do that is you've got to do all the steps. You've got to shape them by hand, you can't use dough forming machines.

There's a number of places that have switched from hand-rolling in LA to forming machines. Yes, labor is expensive, but it's important to shape it by hand, not just because of the tradition of it, but remember, I said that earlier is part of eating a bagel is eating it with your eyes and seeing that perfectly imperfect thing. When it's perfect and it looks just like a store-bought bagel, you shouldn't be a bakery at that point, you should be a manufacturer making stuff for retail. But if you're one you're cooking for the public, when you're serving the public and the role of what I believe a true restaurant should be doing is bringing something of value to the neighborhood. And that is giving them the taste of history, giving them a taste of something that's made with care ... 

And I didn't know that again, until I wrote this essay. I thought I was just doing, because what I was doing was for my ego to show people how good of a cook I was. And that's not the reason you do that. You show them how good of a cook you are, because you want to give them an experience that is worth the price of admission. And if you can give them an experience for a $1.85 freaking good deal. And so that's why we're trying to keep our bagels under two bucks.

Is there anything you want a shout-out about, like when you're opening or planning to open?

If you could shout at the city, tell them to stop giving us grief and let us open already, we would love it. But once I'm given possession of the space from my contractor, I would definitely adhere to whatever date I state for our grand opening date. But until the contractor is out of the space, I cannot do that unfortunately. I've already been burned enough because the space was supposed to have been turned over in December of last year, then in April, then June, August, then no later than October 31st, definitely by the end of November, now I'm thinking it's going to be in December. But yeah, I wish I could give you a better date, but it's not under my control yet. But it's soon, it's very soon. It's one to two weeks of work, the question is, are we going to get workers to do one to two weeks of work in one to two weeks or not? And it's possible.

It's soon, I promise soon. And we're doing a pop-up in December for sure. And we plan to do maybe even one more before we open. And if we're having any issues getting open, but we are given the space where we can actually get a health permit, we'll do pop-up. We have a walkup window and we might just do pop-ups out of the walkup window until we're ready to open.

Look out for the opening of Bagel + Slice by following them on Instagram.