c/o Ava Becker

As a talented doom-scroller and longtime foodie, I spend a fair amount of time watching food content on social media. I am a food trend skeptic, and yet, every once in a while I find myself curious to try a bizarre recipe that I find online. This curiosity struck when, last Saturday afternoon, I began to crave a good bagel. Weshop provided me with my essentials, including Philadelphia cream cheese, cucumber, tomato, red onion, and lox, and then, feeling creative, I decided to attempt one of the food trends that has been circulating my feed.

Enter the chopped bagel. As my bagel was toasting, I diced my vegetables into small pieces, and then mixed in a healthy amount of cream cheese and lox. As I combined this all, though, I started to feel a sense of shame. Why mess with such a timeless classic? Who am I to think I can improve what has already reached perfection? After assembling the bagel with a healthy amount of salt and pepper, I took a bite and realized that this variation of the bagel is interesting not in its flavor, but rather in its take on the typical bagel-eating experience. The magic of the chopped bagel lies in the structure: no topping fallout, no uneven distribution of flavor. Every bite contains every element, creating the most pleasant and effortless balance of texture and flavor. The joy of this trend is that it is easy to get creative with it! Try your favorite sandwich or salad in chopped form; it may be delicious. All you need is to follow the instructions below with any combination of deli meat, vegetables, and some sort of dressing or spread. 

Chopped Bagel

Ingredients

• 2–3 cucumber slices
• 4 cherry/grape tomatoes or 2 slices larger tomato
• 1 thick slice red onion
• 1 bagel, toasted
• 2–4 ounces cream cheese
• 3–4 thin slices Nova lox
• Capers
• Salt and pepper

Instructions

1. Dice all vegetables while the bagel is toasting, using a large knife. You can chop up each one individually, but if you want to do it like the professionals on TikTok, arrange the cucumber, tomato, and onion in a pile and run your knife back and forth, rotating the whole mess as needed. 
2. Incorporate the cream cheese and lox; the lox can be placed on top of everything in the first step as well, but the cream cheese should be placed in small dollops around the whole mixture (which should be quite mixed up already). Once everything seems well mixed and chopped into small pieces, season with salt, pepper, and capers, and chop for one more minute, until your arm hurts. 
3. Spread mixture generously onto toasted bagel. This can be done by using the bagel half itself to push the mixture onto the other bagel half, which is another TikTok hack. And don’t worry if your cream cheese-lox concoction is spilling out of the bagel; this is expected, and whatever spills out can be licked up!

Ava Becker can be reached at abecker@wesleyan.edu.