Montreal bagel at @fairmountbagel 📍Montreal, Canada 🇨🇦 Explore Canada: tasteatlas.com/canada The Montreal bagel is a dense, imperfect ring of dough. Eastern European Jewish immigrants brought the recipe to Canada in the early 1900s, and the bakeries that opened back then still use the exact same manual method today. The dough is rolled by hand into an uneven circle with a wide hole, leaving no room for a thick, fluffy center. Bakers drop the raw dough into a rolling boil of honey-sweetened water. This step locks in a distinct sweetness and turns the exterior into a sticky trap for seeds. Once coated entirely in sesame or poppy, the bagels are lined up on long, narrow wooden boards and shoved straight into a glowing wood-fired oven. The bakers constantly feed the fire and shuffle the boards, working fast in the intense heat. They emerge blistered and smelling of wood smoke. The honey-water bath creates a hard crust, while the open flames char the outer layer of seeds. Underneath that crunch, the dough is tight, heavy, and chewy. Bakeries like Fairmount operate 24 hours a day, pulling fresh batches from the ashes constantly. Locals grab them hot in a brown paper bag to eat plain right on the street, or slice them open to hold a heavy smear of cream cheese and thick cuts of cured salmon.