Q. Crackers or wafers made from wheat and advertised as bagel crisps or slices of authentically toasted bagels, that indeed taste accordingly and look like rings cut from a bagel, is their brocho mezonos or hamotzi?

A.   It is unlikely that actual bagels were used for making these sliced round toasted wafers and they were probably baked in long tubes of bagel dough and then sliced or using  a similar mass industrial process.

Vessein Brocho (p. 466) maintains that toasted bagels and pita chips when specially manufactured for the production of toasted chips, will require a Mezonos brocho. However, if they were made from left over bagels or parts thereof, the brocho should be Hamotzi.

Horav Shlomo Miller’s Shlit’a opinion is that since even the first kind, do look like slices from bagels (Tzuras Hapa’as) and they taste accordingly, one must wash Netilas Yodaim and recite Hamotzi on them. The Rov added that they should also be Pas Yisroel.

Rabbi A. Bartfeld as advised by Horav Shlomo Miller and Horav Aharon Miller Shlit’a