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Alison Pray, founder and co-owner of Standard Baking Co. in Portland, taste-tests bagels at the Portland Press Herald. Staff photo by Gregory Rec
The judges were swift and severe.
After getting their first look at the bagels lined up in the center of a conference room table in the Press Herald newsroom, they immediately dismissed the anemic ones on the end because they looked as if they hadn’t spent enough time in an oven. Some judges refused to acknowledge that they even were bagels, labeling them “bread with holes.”
They were “just not even worth talking about,” one judge decreed as others nodded in agreement.