TOOL : Off With Your Bread

Cutting a bagel in half may not seem like one of civilization’s most demanding tasks, but it can have its difficulties. If you use a butter knife or the little plastic knives delis sometimes throw in the bag, you must first pierce the torus and then attempt to saw around the circumference of the bagel until one cut theoretically meets the other but often does not.

A long bread knife is at first woefully inadequate to the crisp, slippery yet elastic surface of properly baked bagel, then may plunge through the soft crumb all too precipitously, often at an unfortunate angle, causing one side of the bagel or another to be far too thick, or far worse, precipitating a hot gush of arterial blood. (We have all seen the statistics on Sunday morning bagel injuries.) There exist various plastic jobbies designed to cut bagels, but they tend to be inadequate to the task.

Brooklyn Bagel Bakery near downtown, the alpha and omega of bagels in Los Angeles, charges an extra dime to send its densely poppy-seeded marvels down a chute into its industrial bagel slicer, and I have often contemplated making my fortune manufacturing a domestic version of that machine, even as that fortune dwindles dime by dime.

But now comes the Bagel Biter, a wickedly serrated triangular blade riveted to a handle of molded, high-impact plastic, as frightening a hunk of stainless steel as anything ever brandished at Jean-Claude Van Damme, and fitting with a thump into a heavy-duty bagel-accommodating base. A Bagel Biter bites any bagel neatly in two, from dense pumpernickel monsters to fluffy supermarket monstrosities, with a minimum of crumbs, a maximum of safety, and no annoying dents where you have attempted to anchor a bagel with your thumb. This baby may be wildly over-engineered for the simple task at hand, but then again . . . so is a Volvo.

Available at The Sharper Image stores and Plaza Cutlery in Costa Mesa