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(Click here for what I now consider a better
recipe!) Recipe for 16 pretzels:
2 envelope rapid rise yeast
2 cups hot tap water (100-115 F)
1/2 tsp sugar
6 cups (800g) bread flour
7 tbsp vegetable shortening
3 tsp kosher salt, plus more for sprinkling
1 liter lye dip
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Prepare the lye dip. Lye is the bizzare secret ingredient
here, and it's absolutely required. I've seen and tried other
pretzel recipes that specify baking soda instead, but they're
completely inferior products: the color is splotchy and weak,
and the flavor is simply not the same. So forget about baking
soda.
Lye can be dangerous: it's a powerful base, and it'll eat right through
skin and other useful materials. Lye is the main ingredient in
drain cleaners like Drano and Red Devil.
If you have kids, make sure you
have a plan for
keeping them away from this stuff. Use rubber gloves and
goggles when handling it.
Why on earth would you add it to your baked goods? Apparently, the
brief contact with lye sort of precooks the surface; it breaks
up the gluten so it caramelizes in the oven. The pretzels are
perfectly safe once they've been baked. Some other foods are
treated with lye before cooking, but hominy is the only one
that comes to mind. Anyway, if a pretzel is still wet
from the dip, then it's still dangerous, so be careful with it.
In Swabia (in southwestern Germany), I had good luck getting the lye dip
by asking a friendly
pretzel baker. I found it much harder to come by food-grade
lye in the U.S. But, once you know where to go, it's not hard.
I ordered 500 g from Fisher Scientific, catalog number
S320-500, and paid something like
$38 in 1999. That's a lot of lye, good for several years of
lye dip.
Here's a link to
Fisher.
You need Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH)
pellets rated NF/FCC ("National Formulary / Food Chemicals
Codex").
The FCC designation is what makes it food-grade.
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Once you have the pellets, measure out 40 grams and carefully add them to a
liter of cool water. If you don't have a scale, you can
probably wing it with 3 tablespoons of pellets per liter of
water,
assuming your pellets look like mine. See the indistinct photo
on the right; my teaspoon there weighs 4g.
It will take 10 minutes or so of stirring with a nonreactive spoon for the
pellets to dissolve. I use stainless steel for this, and I
haven't had any problems. As you reuse the dip, bits of dough
will collect in it over several batches, but it's not clear to
me that this hurts the pretzels. Still, mix a new batch
whenever you feel the need.
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Now for the dough. Combine the first three ingredients well and proof if you're nervous about
the yeast. Add the flour, vegetable shortening, and kosher
salt to a mixing bowl. Mix roughly with a spoon until it's starting
to stick together.
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Knead, knead, knead, until it's supple and soft. The shortening will
make it a bit sticky, but it should be a nice sturdy piece of dough. I
let my Kitchenaid pound on it with the dough hook on setting 2/10 for about
10 minutes. The dough should pull away cleanly from the bowl after the
first few minutes. Larger quantities have a tendency to climb out of the
bowl, so cram it back in every now and then.
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Knead a touch more manually so you know it's perfect. |
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Start to rise. |
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After 45 mins or so, we're ready to continue. |
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Take a wad of dough (1/16th) and roll it with your hands,
leaving it a little fat in the middle.
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This will take a little persistence, since the dough is still somewhat
elastic. This photo was taken seconds after the previous one,
showing how it snaps back.
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But, after another 45 seconds or so of bullying, you win the battle.
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Begin to tie the knot. Notice I've pinched little balls at the end of the
strands.
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Cross over the strands,
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giving them a twist ...
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and poke them onto the pretzel's belly.
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Minor adjustments never hurt.
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The last three I screwed up while shaping,
and rather wait for them to relax again, I just turned them back
into rolls.
Heat the oven to 450 F with a bread stone in place. (I keep a pizza stone
in
there all the time.) Cover the pretzels---the raw dough should
always be
kept covered!---and let them rise another 15-20 mins.
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With the oven heated and the pretzels risen, you're almost ready to bake.
You'll have to quickly dip a batch, cut their gluten coats, and
salt them before they hit the oven. After dipping, the pretzels
are pretty hard to manage. I use a polished granite tile ($6
from Home Depot) for this; it's flat, has no lip, and it fits in
my sink
to wash. Get your latex gloves and goggles on.
Carefully slip a pretzel into the dip. Ignore my cavalier attitude
about the gloves, I'm a fool. (Seriously, it's hard to pick
up a raw pretzel with gloves on, so I keep my right hand away
from the lye and a glove on my left. The sink's nearby, and
this solution won't eat through your hand instantly anyway. I
only suffer about one droplet every few times I bake.)
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Each pretzel has to soak for 25-30 seconds for the full effect.
They float, so I bounce them around with my flat strainer.
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These wet blobs will eventually stick a little, but initially they just
slide around, so be prepared for that when placing them.
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Now you have to cut open the bellies so they don't burst in an uncontrolled
way in the oven. Get a sharp knife, dip it into the lye so it
won't just gum up against the wet dough, and cut a gash in each
of your batch while stabilizing the pretzel somehow so it doesn't
slide. (I don't always do this. If the pretzels don't have a
huge amount of oven spring left in them, they won't burst
anyway. The "showcase" pretzel at the top of this page wasn't cut.)
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Quickly salt them all...
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| and into the oven. They should sizzle a fair amount when they hit
the hot stone. They'll look pretty flimsy and ragged on their way
into the oven. |
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| After 8-9 mins, they're ready. Use a clean (non-lye) spatula to
get them off the stone.
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| Guck amol, en haufa brezla!! Do I have a great hobby, or what?
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