Will Ina Garten’s Questionable Bagel-Slicing Method Break the Internet? We Have Thoughts

It’s no secret we consider Ina Garten a national treasure, a patron saint and our guiding light. She’s taught us how to make vanilla extract, cook chicken breasts perfectly and make a mean beef stew. We’re not saying we’d jump off a cliff if she asked us to…but one day, we saw Ina Garten wearing army pants and flip flops, so we bought army pants and flip flops.

All that to say, we’re scratching our head at her latest trick. It’s come to light (via a tweet, of course) that the Barefoot Contessa has a method for slicing bagels that has the potential to cause the internet to collapse on itself like a death star. Yes, Ms. Store-Bought Is Fine slices her bagels into thirds. Observe.

“Anytime I have big, thick bagels,” Garten explains in a 2012 episode of her cooking show, Barefoot Contessa, “I like to cut it in thirds.” She then proceeds to slice a bagel horizontally into three pieces—shocking, considering Garten hails from Brooklyn, New York, where the bagels are plush and the cream cheese is laid on thick.

Watching the clip, you think you know where she’s headed: Ina is making a Big Mac bagel sandwich with three layers of bread and two layers of cream cheese. But no, she’s actually just turning large bagels into bagel thins, effectively stretching two bagels into three sandwiches. “I think it tastes better,” she proclaims, then slathers them with homemade herbed cream cheese and adds slices of lox.

So, do we think this will break the internet like the great St. Louis bagel slicing incident of 2019?

No, absolutely not. Friends, she’s Ina Garten. She can do whatever she wants!