Stroud City Bagels Launches Tomorrow at Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, Offering Boiled Bagels

There’s a new bagel in town.

Stroud City Bagels launches at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market on Sat., Sept. 19. And while to start, the new concept will just offer bagels of the everything variety, you can expect more flavors – including some you’ve never expected in bagel form – in the future. 

The bagels come from husband-and-wife team Adam and Monique Stroud. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Adam began cooking and baking more, and one of the things he started making were bagels. He began challenging friends to send him new flavors to try to create, and he would have friends and family over for socially-distanced taste testing. The response was overwhelmingly positive.

“That’s when we started thinking a little bit bigger about if we could spin this into sort of a side business,” Adam says. 

And now, that side business will be present at Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, a stone’s throw away from the Strouds’ home where they make the bagels under Missouri’s cottage food law. Each bagel is boiled then baked right in their kitchen. 

As Stroud City Bagels continues, Adam hopes to be able to introduce flavors that challenge the typical sorts of bagels you’d find at a bakery. He’s already tested batches of sweet potato and nutmeg bagels (with sweet potato right in the dough), a loaded baked potato (with Russet potatoes in the dough), a tri-colored Italian herb bagel, a rainbow bagel and a tomato, pesto and Provel bagel that he says smells just like a pizza. 

“What we’re trying to do is provide a bagel that’s different than the rest,” he says. “It’s softer, we think it’s tastier than some of those bagels that you really need to give your jaw a workout to eat. We want to save the workout for the gym. We just want a soft, tasty bagel that’s going to not adhere to any sort of list of flavors. Just experiment and kind of be fun in that regard.”

For now, you will only be able to find Stroud City Bagels at Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, but Adam says they hope to do festivals and fairs as time goes on and even look into partnering with different coffeehouses. And since the couple both have full-time jobs and bagels aren’t what’s putting food on their table, he hopes that they can use earnings to not only grow the business but to support causes that they care about. They’ve even already done their first fundraiser benefiting Action STL. 

“We want to use it to support other people as much as we can,” Adam says. 

Stroud City Bagels, facebook.com/stroudcitybagels

https://www.feastmagazine.com/st-louis/article_149c3eb6-f9ce-11ea-b973-9b2d3ad9250c.html