With the ease of a master craftsman, Joel Cepeda took a strip of bagel dough, gracefully slipped it around his hand  and, with the slightest flick of the wrist, sealed the two ends.

“See,” he said to the 10 children squeezed close to him in this tiny basement room that is the epicenter of bagel production for Zucker’s Bagels and Smoked Fish. “It’s easy.”

The children, students from Tribeca Hebrew, were at the Chambers Street store for a two-day crash course in the art of bagel-making.

Cepeda stood next to the tools of his trade, a giant mixer and a long table.

“First, I put in malt,” Cepeda said, tossing some into the mixer. “That gives it the crispy texture on the outside. Then the flour.” He effortlessly picked up a 50-pound bag, ripped it open and dumped it in. Then he poured in water. Before adding the last ingredient, yeast, he let the children smell it. “Icchh,” they said one by one.

“Don’t worry,” he said, laughing, “that just gets dissipated in the mix.”

Next, the big moment came. On the long cutting table lay a giant mound of dough.

Cepeda re-moved one of the knives from the wall.

“Move back,” he said, “I use a very sharp knife. It doesn’t care how old you are, it will cut you.”

After Cepeda sliced strips of dough, the students took turns learning to “roll” a bagel.

As they perfected their technique, Cepeda cheerfully told them about his own road to bagel-making (“I learned how to roll when I was 12 or 13. My uncle taught me.”) along with some neighborhood bagel facts (“I have to make a lot of whole wheat bagels. They’re one of the most popular ones here.”).  

Within 15 minutes, the students considered themselves experts and were giving each other advice. “That’s too thin.” “Use the whole thing.”

Cepeda encouraged them as they practiced. “Two people could eat that bagel!” he said of  particularly large one. Of an ill-shapen one, he told its maker, “Okay. That’s cool.”

The next afternoon, the group returned. They watched as the bagels they had made the day before were dropped into a cauldron of boiling water for 30 seconds, scooped out with a gigantic slotted spoon, and put in a 500-degree oven that stretched some eight feet wide.

As they waited for the bagels to bake (15 minutes), the children reviewed the experience.

Jack Wiley, 9, described the bagel- making process as “huge,” and conceded that he had never imagined that it required so much work.

Lauren Davidson, also 9, was surprised by how bagels got their holes (“I thought they cut it out”).

What they all agreed on was that there is nothing like a bagel.

“Bagels are my favorite food,” Davidson said, then corrected herself. “Bagels with cream cheese.”