Alden and Sarah Jones didn’t choose bagels. Bagels chose them.

The Upper Valley wanted, nay demanded, an authentic New York-style bagel made by local hands, from local ingredients. And the recent closing of a couple of bagel enterprises had left a hole (pardon the pun).

Customers at the Joneses’ food truck in Orford kept saying the same thing. “ ‘What about bagels? Do you guys make bagels?’ ” Alden Jones recalled. “That’s what the market kind of revealed to us.”

So, in 2013, the couple went all in on the chewy, toastable bread rings, opening Goose & Willie’s Hand Rolled Bagels at their home in Orford. Six years later, they’re cranking out 7,500 bagels every week from their home bakery and delivering to six local stores and four restaurants, including the Dartmouth College dining center.

The Joneses aren’t the only bakers fulfilling the region’s appetite for locally made bagels, either. These days, area bagel connoisseurs have their pick of several varieties of handmade bagels sold in stores and restaurants around the region — though you have to know where to look.

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, the Upper Valley had at least three thriving shops offering bagels made on the premises: the Baker’s Studio in White River Junction and the Bagel Basement in Hanover and Lebanon. In 2012, after 18 years in business, the much-loved Baker’s Studio closed shop. Around the same time, both the Bagel Basement locations folded. Stone Arch Bakery, which also sold bagels at shops in Lebanon and Claremont, went out of business in 2017.

Chris Calvin, a native New Yorker and professional pastry chef who owned the Baker’s Studio, has continued making bagels under the name Best Bagels from his home bakery in Hartland, but if you want one now, you’ll have to toast it and schmear it yourself.

Like the Joneses, Calvin sells his bagels to area food co-ops. Both Goose & Willie’s and Best Bagels are traditional New York-style bagels, both are sold loose for around $1 each in familiar flavors such as plain, poppy seed and everything, and to a less-than-fine-tuned palate, the two varieties taste pretty similar. Both sell briskly at the co-op stores, and both have their following.

“We’re theoretically in competition with each other ... but there’s room for both of us,” said Jones, who grew up in Orford and learned how to make bagels while working at a bakery near the University of New Hampshire, where he was attending college. He then worked for 10 years for his father’s construction business before he and his wife decided to open a food truck.

There are, however, some subtle differences between the bagels. The Joneses hand roll all of their bagels — yes, all 7,500 — in their home kitchen, a practice that Alden Jones said makes them unique in the region.

“Hand-rolling is more about the aesthetic,” he said. “One bagel to the next will look pretty different ... some will have a bigger hole, some will have a smaller hole, that type of thing.”

But don’t worry: A bigger hole doesn’t mean a smaller bagel in this case. Sarah Jones weighs every piece of dough to ensure uniformity.

And while they follow a traditional New York bagel recipe, the Joneses have put a spin on their process in response to the needs of the region. Whereas New Yorkers have the luxury of buying fresh bagels every day if they wish, here in the Upper Valley, bagels aren’t always eaten the day they’re baked. To give their bagels a slightly longer shelf life, the Joneses extended their fermentation process so that every batch of bagels ferments for at least 24 hours.

“It makes our product not get as hard and dense so quickly, which we feel is important for the area we live in,” said Jones, “It gives us some interesting flavor for sure.”

The Joneses, who named their business after the childhood nicknames of their two daughters, Lila and Sophie, aren’t the only ones peddling a bagel that’s distinctly Upper Valley. If you shop at the South Royalton Market, you can pick up an actual “Vermont-style bagel.”

And what, exactly, is that?

Well, it’s what Heather Lynn says it is. After she opened the Wild Fern restaurant and bakery in Stockbridge about six years ago, Lynn found that she was getting a lot of inquiries about her bagels.

“People started stopping by and asking me if I had New York-style bagels or even Montreal bagels,” said Lynn, who makes about four dozen bagels for the South Royalton Market weekly. “So I painted a sign and I said, ‘I’m going to call them Vermont-style bagels.’ Now people stop by wondering what a Vermont bagel is.”

Like any serious bagel baker, Lynn uses malt syrup and follows the prescribed proof-boil-bake process that yields the bagel’s characteristic texture. Aside from calling them Vermont bagels and using all local ingredients, including King Arthur Flour, there’s nothing particularly Vermonty about them, Lynn said.

“There’s a difference only because we all make things differently,” she said.

Lynn, who makes standard flavors as well as a couple of specialties, including asiago garlic and cheddar dill onion, has shipped bagels to several New Yorkers who tasted them on a visit to Vermont — which is akin to a Vermonter ordering maple syrup from, say, Pennsylvania.

So serious are New Yorkers about their bagels, so venerated is the bagel tradition, that famed New Yorker food writer Calvin Trillin viewed them as the litmus test for establishing native heritage. When his young daughter commented that the bagels in his hometown of Kansas City tasted like “just round bread,” Trillin awoke at once to the reality that she was an authentic New Yorker.

If they aspire to New York-bagel standards, local bakers are not bound by such cultural expectations, leaving them free to define Upper Valley bagels as they wish.

For the Brick House Bakery in Bradford, Vt., which supplies fresh bagels to the nearby Local Buzz cafe, a defining feature is Vermont cheddar cheese.

Read Carlan, who has taken over the home baking business since his wife, Jean, went back to work full time, makes about 18 dozen bagels a week for the cafe, mostly in traditional varieties. But Vermont cheddar is among the signature flavors, he said. People also like that the bagels are made just up the road from the cafe, with local ingredients.

Jean Carlan began baking bagels about 10 years ago when the Local Buzz opened and needed a supplier. A chain restaurant in West Lebanon that the owner had planned to buy from had just closed, and at the time, nobody else in the area was making bagels, Read Carlan said.

That was also about the time that the local food craze was beginning to take off.

“It’s interesting the evolution of the bagel industry,” he said.

Just this week, someone approached Calvin (of Best Bagels) to see if he’d be interested in opening a bagel shop again. Though he misses his bakery, where he also sold wedding cakes and other pastries, Calvin said he doesn’t miss the rent he had to pay to run a retail business or the headaches of hiring and retaining staff. Plus, he gets to interact with the public when he sells his bagels and other bakery items at the Norwich Farmer’s Market.

“I’m good where I am,” he said.

Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com and 603-727-3268.

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