I Stole and I Lyed

just because you asked me to.

So I've been making pretzels on a fairly regular basis lately, for a few reasons.  They are fun to make, they impress people (which is always a priority for me, of course), and they involve dangerous chemicals.  What fun!

Wait, dangerous chemicals?  What's all this about?  Well, all pretzels have secrets, and in this case it is a magical white powder called sodium hydroxide, or lye.  My go to illustration for what lye is, and why it is bad, is that scene from Fight Club.  Tyler explains that lye is used to make soap and then uses a chemical burn to go on some sort of existential rant.  (The bit about soap is true; a metallic alkaline solution combined with fat causes saponification, the process of making soap!  This process can lead to soapy cookies if you have too much baking soda in the mix without enough acid to neutralise it.  Keep that in mind!)

What does this have to do with pretzels?  Well, just before pretzels are baked, they get dipped in lye.  The lye solution has a pH of 13 (so I gather; I have no litmus papers hanging around the kitchen).  The alkaline environment coating the pretzels aids in various browning reactions that create that deep crust color.  It also adds unique flavor and texture to the surface of the pretzel.

Is it safe to eat?  Well, throw back a shot of lye and you'll be feeling very sick and ill, indeed.  But in the oven, chemical reactions happen that make it safe to eat.  This specifically involves the Carbon Dioxide present in the dough, CO₂ being the waste product of yeast that is harnessed to make bread rise.  Lye, being NaOH, combines with the CO₂ and evaporating H₂O to create both Na₂CO₃ and Na₂HCO₃, being sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, respectively.  Both of which are much safer to eat than NaOH!

All this aside, there are other applications for this crazy food science.  The Norwegian abomination delicacy known as Lutefisk involves soaking fish in lye to denature and "jelly" the proteins.  Soak dried corn in lye and you get hominy, the plump morsels of corn found in menudo and pozole.  Use lye to make pasta, and your noodles will turn out ramen-yellow.

---

Chemicals aside, let's make pretzels.  The back story: I made pretzels at a bakery for a while, but was always dissatisfied with them.  I've developed my own formula and technique that comes much closer to an authentic pretzel than the bakery's interpretation.  Theirs are dense and rich.  Good, but a bit..."much."  (My current boss, born and raised in Vienna, has given me awesome feedback along the way).

So here we are:

• 100% Bread Flour
• 52.5% Water
• 10% Butter (or a solid veg fat if you're veganomically inclined)
• 2ish% Salt
• 1.75ish% Dry Yeast

 (side note: I'll always give plain English measurements if you want them, but let's be honest: I don't expect anyone following this blog to make the stuff I write about.  But let me know.)

Mix the dough, knead till smooth and springy, shape into a ball and let rest for no more than 20 minutes.  This allows the gluten to relax without any real yeast activity happening.  We want most of the rising to happen after shaping; this controls the internal crumb of the pretzels somehow or another.  Roll out the dough into a squareish shape.  Do you like that little baby rolling pin?  Handmade out of teak by my friend and his dad.  Smooth as glass!

Scale out the dough to 45g pieces, keep under plastic wrap to prevent drying.  I scaled this batch to make 20 pretzels at 45g each, which is less than half the size that I usually make.  I'm experimenting with mini guys because my friend wants me to make mini pretzels for her engagement party.

For pretzel shaping, we first want to get these blobs of dough into a tight little cylinder.  We let the cylinder relax for a few minutes (really, just long enough to go through the whole batch and then come back around to the beginning again.)

This is called a preshape.  This is necessary because gluten has a very good memory.  If you've ever taken a wad of bread dough and tried to roll it in your hands to form a ball, Play-Doh style, you know it doesn't work that way.  You have to give it an initial round shape to "program" the dough to accept the final shape.  In this case, our final shape is essentially a rope, so we make an initial version of the rope to tell the dough where it's headed.

But here, how about a video?  You know I hate making them, but I know you love watching them, so here you are.  Being without a Gorillapod, I have no convenient place for a camera, so my clunky hands get in the way of these small dough pieces.  Sorry about that, but I promise it might be interesting.  The first video covers preshape and final shape for the traditional pretzel.  The second video covers some other final shapes that I think are fun.

After shaping, we let them rise till just about doubled in size, and then pop them in the freezer.  This firms them up, which eases the lye dip.  Speaking of, here's the set up for the lye dip.  I use that bucket on the far left to mix the solution, using 75g of lye to 1.5kg water (5% solution).  Creating this solution gives off a lot of heat, so add lye to cold water only.  It also gives off some sort of gas for a short bit which makes me choke and feel this throat pain that I've never felt before, so that's fun.  Keep a loose lid on top for ten minutes or so to control this; after that it's fine.

Dip, sprinkle with salt (I use Maldon, because it's flaky and British), bake at 375 for 18ish minutes, cool, dip in mustard, nutella, jam, whatever you like.  There you have it!