{"id":7984,"date":"2018-01-07T21:14:54","date_gmt":"2018-01-08T03:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=7984"},"modified":"2018-01-07T21:14:54","modified_gmt":"2018-01-08T03:14:54","slug":"pretzel-making-fear-not-lye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/01\/pretzel-making-fear-not-lye.html","title":{"rendered":"Pretzel-making, or, fear not the lye!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"IMG_2530\"<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one thing that\u2019s ubiquitous in Germany but scarcely available here, it\u2019s pretzels.<\/p>\n

Sure, it\u2019s possible to find recipes for them, e.g., this recipe for Bavarian Pretzels at allrecipes.com<\/a>.\u00a0 \u00a0A fairly generic dough, and a dip in a baking-soda bath before baking.\u00a0 But when I\u2019d made similar recipes, it came out, well, meh.\u00a0 \u00a0I did some further reading and saw that what\u2019s really needed is a lye bath, and I ordered a container of lye from amazon.com.\u00a0 But that was ages ago, and I was, in the end, intimidated by all of the warnings about lye.\u00a0 Even the authors of the New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day<\/em><\/a> write that they were so intimidated by warnings on their lye package that, they chickened out.<\/p>\n

Finally, after my son had bugged me enough about wanting to make pretzels, I summoned up the nerve to undertake the project.\u00a0 Make the dough, shape into pretzels, make a bath of water with a small amount of lye, dip the pretzels one at a time, let rise briefly, and bake.\u00a0 According to the internet, the lye, however much you\u2019re instructed to handle it with gloves, isn\u2019t a danger in the finished product because it\u2019s heavily diluted and because of some sort of chemical reaction during baking.<\/p>\n

And they were tasty!\u00a0 I could have baked them for longer for a proper, crispy German pretzel, and if I\u2019d had more skill they would have been better-shaped, but I\u2019m still satisfied, especially since this was a \u201cday before the (low-carb) diet starts\u201d project.<\/p>\n

My recipe and process<\/h3>\n

The basic recipe I took from the above-mentioned Artisan Bread book, which I used often enough that I actually have this in my cookbook collection and is worth the shelf space.\u00a0 Their approach is to create basic recipes that can be used with multiple variations; the recipe for pretzels is the same one as for bagels, though we halved it because their method is to mix up quantities that can be used for multiple loaves.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the halved-quantity recipe:<\/p>\n