Sizzling Blood and the Unholy Stench...

...Of Murder.

As some of you know, I currently work at a kitchen supply store.  We have all sorts of gadgets, from the mundane to the insane.  The other day, some of the kids in my baking class asked what might be the strangest gadget in our repertoire.  Our manager brought them to the duck press.

The duck press is something that I've noticed in the store since I began working there over two years ago.  However, I never knew what it was, nor did I even think of it as some sort of kitchen tool.  It sits up on a shelf, the only of its kind, as if it is merely a decorative knick knack.  When I learned that it is for sale, and that it retails for just under $2,000, I was filled with curiosity.

What does it do??  What is it for??  A DUCK press?  Do you press the whole duck in there?  What do you press?  Why does it have duck feet??

Well, the initial explanation I received involved pressing organs to make pate juices and au jus.  Duck juice extraction for sauces, essentially.

That was weird, but then I delved further and discovered a classic French dish that goes by a few different names.  If you're lucky, you'll get a canard a la presse, or pressed duck.  If you're some sort of pagan meat fiend, however, you'll order by another name: either canard a la rouennaise, or canard au sang.  Duck in blood sauce, or duck in blood, respectively.

WiseGeek has a pretty good description.

In short, a live duck is strangled (so as to minimise blood loss), partially roasted, and then broken down.  Meaty hunks are removed for further roasting, and then the carcass is pressed to extract all sorts of blood and marrow.  This extraction is used as the basis for the sauce that is then poured over the roasted meat.  Oh yes, all this pressed business is done by the waiter AT YOUR TABLE.  So you get to watch (and presumably hear and smell) the duck get crushed, you sick, sick little man.

If you want to view pictures of the process from La Tour d'Argent, a Parisian restaurant that serves the dish for 130 €, head over to fxcuisine.com.  But I'm warning you, those pictures are nasty gross.

As a side note, La Tour d'Argent has every reason to be proud of their dish.  Canetons à la Rouennaise was on the menu of the "Dinner of the Three Emperors," an eight hour meal that "is reputed to have been the most magnificent ever to have occurred in any restaurant in the world." (yes, I just quoted Wikipedia.)  La Tour d'Argent is the restaurant descendant, so to speak, of Café Anglais, where the dinner took place.

Fancy pants aside, I'll never view that duck press the same way again.  This, friends, is why I stay away from the savory side of the kitchen.

Further Thoughts on Lye Pretzels

Here's a bit more to ponder:

Since lye is corrosive, it hates certain metals.  Take aluminum, for instance.  Lye wants to kick aluminum in the face.  And aluminum has no defenses; it's one of the most reactive metals on earth.  You can get aluminum to react with air if you just look at it the wrong way.

Keep in mind that most sheet pans are made out of aluminum, so spilling any amount of lye on them will cause the metal to have a molecular anxiety attack.  Atoms of aluminum freak out and combine with the sodium hydroxide to form weird aluminum salts, with the byproduct being pure hydrogen gas.

It's inevitable that some lye will jack up your pans.  But as a precaution, always bake pretzels on something like parchment paper or a Silpat to control this reaction and subsequent buildup of hydrogen gas in your oven.  (!!!)

What to do with leftover lye?  Easy.  Dump it down the drain followed by a hot water flush.  Is this safe?  Yup: in addition to making world class pretzels, sodium hydroxide is one of the chemicals most commonly used as a drain cleaner.  (According to the MSDS for Pro Strength Liquid Plumr, the concentration level is only HALF what I use for pretzels.  eek!)  Anyway, sodium hydroxide eats away at gunk and also uses the saponification trick to turn trapped grease into soap, essentially causing the drain gunk to clean itself.

If you really want to make pretzels but the lye thing freaks you out, you can simply use a weaker alkali found in the kitchen: baking soda.  Mix it up with water for the dip, but you will have to bring the mix to around 190 degrees (F) or so.  Essentially, the pretzels will be poached, just like making bagels!  Everyone is happy!

I should also say, bibliography style, that Joe Pastry has taught me a lot about lye pretzels.  While I hope to have added some to the discussion without directly plagiarising his work, I make no guarantees.  Check out his posts here.

That is all!

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.

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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!