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Note: E5 Bakehouse has suspended preparation of its bagels until a new, larger oven is up and running.  I’ll let you know when they’re back in production.

If you already found it next to hopeless to graze through all the must eats of London Fields on a single Saturday, from Banhmi11 Vietnamese baguettes at Broadway Market to Lucky Chip burgers and Home Slice Pizza at Netil Market, your life just got a lot more complicated: The not-to-be-missed bagels at e5 Bakehouse, Ben MacKinnon‘s exceptional bread bakery under the railway arches beside London Fields station, are only baked on Saturday afternoons. And good as those bagels are when carried home for toasting at the next day’s Sunday brunch, topped with a schmear of creamed cheese and draped with fat-glistening Scottish smoked salmon, they are at their pristine best when consumed plain and hot – not more than 5 minutes and 5 metres from the e5 Bakehouse’s ovens.

The name “e5” may come from the bakery’s Hackney postcode but I take it to mean “eat within five”.

No one would confuse the 60p e5 bagel, made with white flour and white sourdough starter, with a bloated New York bagel, the world’s most famous. Likewise, it has little in common with a honey-sweetened Montreal bagel, the world’s best. Even the traditional East London bagel or, if you prefer, beigel, is no closer than a distant cousin, the relative proximity (2k) between e5 Bakehouse and Brick Lane Beigel Bake notwithstanding. Lastly, brace yourself for a big shock: Ben MacKinnon is not Jewish.

But the e5 white sourdough bagel is hand-rolled, as all the best bagels are. It’s boiled before being baked, as authentic bagels must be. And it’s soft yet beautifully chewy, unlike the squishy and bready bagels you find at supermarkets. To eat a fresh one you must clamp down on it with your teeth and then tear it away from your mouth to break off a bite-sized piece. Eating a bagel is never effortless. If there’s no exertion there’s no bagel.

Is Ben’s bagel the definitive one? No. Is it flawless? Hardly. It could maybe be sweeter and crustier. A coat of sesame seeds or Malden salt flakes would be nice. A wood-fired oven, perhaps borrowed from neighbour Home Slice Pizza, wouldn’t hurt. Indeed, if you told Ben his bagels could be improved it’s likely he’d agree. They are works in progress: The ones I had yesterday – I bought 8 and devoured 3 on the spot – had a tougher and, in my mind, better bottom than the soft-bottomed versions from an earlier batch.

So should you maybe wait a few months until the bagels get better? No. Such a strategy is all hole and no bagel. Ben’s rings of goodness are already the only bagels of artisan quality I have tried in London since moving here in 2004, other than the pretzel bagels at Luca’s Bakery in East Dulwich. To my knowledge, amongst UK bakers only Pump Street Bakery, in Orford, Suffolk, has comparably high standards and aspirations for its bagels.

The great challenge for the Saturday grazer of London Fields is synchronising stops at e5 Bakehouse with the release of its organic, hand-made bagels. Yesterday I waited a half-hour for my bagels, an improvement over the 50 minutes I waited the week before. During those excruciatingly long 3000 seconds I thought to myself, if only there were an e5 Bakehouse bagel app linked to the oven timers sounding off when breads were nearly done. But then I imagined this Solomonic dilemma: Imagine standing near the front of the queue at Banhmi11, minutes from a pan-fried catfish sandwich, when the hot bagel alert from the app on your iPhone sent vibrations up and down your front pocket. The question is: Would you stay or would you go?