Saw your post. Immediately made this recipe with my 13-year old daughter. FAST EASY TASTY. I especially recommend with yellow mustard or Munchener senf, and a nice Helles. We drank Hummingbird Helles, from Red Oak Brewing in North Carolina. Thank you!
Reasonably dark mustard, please, or at least not that wimpy Frenchâs or its supermarket clones! Soft pretzels with mustard were a popular Philly thing when I was a kid, and they were usually a bit lighter colored than these, so they probably used bicarb rather than lye.
I donât know if you can still find washing soda these days (sodium carbonate, rather than the bicarbonate), or if itâd be food-grade if you can, but it used to exist.
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Also, I was somewhat puzzled that youâre using a yeast recipe, but thereâs not much rising time here.
Lowering the pH does a couple things to the surface of pretzel and bagels as far as I understand it. Lower pH accelerate maillard browning reactions. So you get a much darker color, and the associated baked/roasted flavor much quicker. You can do the same thing by adding a tiny bit of baking soda or baking powder to roast chicken. Because youâre browning it deeply in less time the interior can stay softer/moister, and the crust will be less âhardâ (as in fresh baguette) and more toward âchewyâ. Treating the surface also helps to set the dough on the crust early (though I think that mostly when using the simmering method from the heat) so you get a smooth even crust that splits or âsmilesâ in the way that a good pretzel does. Also it makes the surface tacky, and wet, so toppings like salt stick better. Finally thereâs a pretty distinct tastes to alkali washed breads you just donât get otherwise. Youâre pretzel wonât actually taste like a pretzel unless you give it this sort of treatment. You can get similar color out of an egg wash but it tastes like regular bread instead of a pretzel.
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I think that " Do not use mayonnaise, no matter what some dude on the internet says," is going into my list of generally applicable rules of life, right along with "Never eat at a place called âMomâsâ " and âNever start a land war in Asia.â
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Soft delicious German style pretzels usually never has that specific taste that âsimpleâ recipes have. Iâve tried the soft variety all over North America and although I live in NYC, the only bakery I have found outside of Germany that makes the amazing (smelling and) tasting pretzels is in Mississauga, Ontario.
And people: butter, not mustard.
I just made these as well and they were superb! Thanks for posting the recipe.
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OMG. Just made these with my 3-year-old. So good and easy. (I confess to dipping in a mayo/dijon mixture, since Iâm a mustard wimp.) Put salt on 4 of them, cinnamon sugar on the other 2. Both highly recommended.
One last bit of advice: Just double the recipe right off the bat. Youâll need them all.
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You can order it from Amazon and a couple of other places. You have to sign for it because it is packaged like the dangerous substance it is.
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Even better for the kids!
Try making a batch w/o the boiling water â makes it even easier (and boiling H20 is completely unnecessary). Great pretzels need the high-pH bath (lye ~14 or baking soda ~9). Boiling water is for bagels. Commercial bakeries in Germany have a lye wash in warm water.
Adding food grade lye to boiling water is very dangerous â exothermic reaction can cause the water to over boil and create a gas cloud. Donât get burn your eyes or lungs chemically â just use room temp water.
Baking soda pretzels taste great, look great (as long as you donât put them beside lye pretzels). The baking soda bath gives you a pH of ~9. Food grade lye from Amazon.com will give you a pH of ~13/14. Better color, better flavor, and surprisingly, better texture.
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This colorful gentleman shows how to use lye. Spray bottle would work as well. Be sure to use foil over your baking sheet â lye might damage a non-stick surface.
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Here in Munich Brezân are so ubiquitous that I never bothered to make my own. I do often do the traditional MĂźnchner breakfast of a Butterbrezân (a soft pretzel sliced in half and slathered in butter), bought at one of the bakeries next to the U-Bahn stop that I get on at.
Yes, I have a buttered soft pretzel with my coffee. I recommend it.
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I bake pretzels at home, using lye. Itâs easy. I find itâs less intimidating if you think of it this way:
1 part water, 3 parts flour.
To make it tastier, mix up a portion of flour and water the night before and let it sit in the fridge with just a smidge of yeast. Then, the next day, make up the rest of the recipe (so, subtract what you added the day before). Itâll add richness to the recipe. There are some other rules:
â Salt retards the yeast, so use sparingly.
â Oil results in a bread that doesnât rise as much.
â Sugar(s) help the yeast, and more interesting sugars are more interesting (molasses yay)
â Use lye for the ârealâ pretzel flavor and smell
â The pH of the water influences how hot the water should be. The more basic, the âcoolerâ the water, so if you use lye just use a warm water bath. If you use baking soda, gently boiling water is OK.
There is no such thing as âfood grade lye.â Pure lye is a chemical, NaOH, and as long as what you buy is pure, then itâs food grade. You can get a 1lb canister on Amazon for about $10. 1tb for 1 quart of water (or, approx a 9x9 glass baking dish) is just right. Wear rubber gloves, make the water warm (about 100F/38C).
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Donât you mean raising the pH? Acid = low pH, Base = high pH
If you keep sourdough starter around, soft pretzels are a great way to use it up. This recipe uses it straight out of the fridge, so itâs a good way to kick off a weekend of baking to warm up the starter. I alternate between this and pizza dough for cold starter. Half the pizza dough goes straight back in the fridge for up to a week for a long, slow proofing time, and is very tasty after five or so days.
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Actually yes I did, good catch.
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