The real thing: homemade Bavarian-style soft pretzels treated with sodium hydroxide lye.
Nothing else gets you that glossy deep mahogany finish while the inside remains moist and pillowy.
That's why hydroxide is traditional. Yes, there are some safety issues to consider and we're going
to discuss those in detail. First dough. For four big pretzels, I've got a cup and a half of water,
355mL but none of these quantities need to be exact. Maybe a teaspoon of sugar, or in this case,
I'm using malted barley syrup. Pretzels are from the land of beer. About a teaspoon of dry yeast,
I'll give it a teaspoon and a half. Some people put in a little fat,
some people don't. I like a tablespoon of oil or melted butter, then like two teaspoons max
of this kosher salt inside the dough. Remember, we're going to have salt on top as well.
Bread flour, if you have it, but all-purpose flour would be fine. As much as I can stir in
with a spoon. This is how I start almost all of my doughs nowadays. This is the stage when dough is
most likely to flow in among the little hairs on your fingers where it dries and then it hurts to
get out. So I mix this stage with a spoon as much flour as I can stir in. Now look how the dough
breaks when I stretch it out. I'm going to let this sit for 15 minutes or so to autolyse. Then
check out how the dough stretches into a sheet. It's a totally different substance. It won't flow
between your hairs and it'll be far easier to knead in almost as much flour as the dough will
take. Traditional pretzel dough is low hydration. Once the dough is dry enough that I don't think
it'll leave a sticky residue on my counter to clean, I'll start kneading on the counter.
You don't have to jam in all the flour. This dough will take, but most of it,
the dough should be just barely sticky like that. That's what circa 55% hydration looks
like. Hydration is the weight of the water divided by the weight of the flour, so I've probably got
like 650 grams of flour in there, four and a half cups or something like that, but I don't
measure. Back in the bowl and cover it to let rise overnight in the fridge or a couple of hours
on the counter. Put a time lapse on that baby and it puffs up almost as fast as my premium mattress
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for 20% off. Thank you Helix. Anyway, I can reuse this plastic wrap in about
two minutes, so save that. Pull out the dough and cut her into quarters. Smash out a quarter into a
little triangle. Grab the tip of the triangle and roll the dough tightly into a little log. This is
a valuable final kneading step and it gets us halfway to our final shape. I'll cover those so
they don't dry out and let the gluten relax for at least 15 minutes or so. Now they'll be much easier
to stretch. No flour on the counter. I want the dough to grip onto the counter lightly. That helps
me roll it out. And a traditional Bavarian thing is to leave the center, the belly of the pretzel,
leave that pretty fat, that part bakes up soft and fluffy while the thin little arms get crispy.
Two treats in one. The pros fold these in one smooth motion up in the air. I'm not that cool.
I'll just lay this on the counter, make a U-shape, fold the arms over on themselves once and then
twice, and then lift them up and back over to seal on the edges of the belly. You'll want to
get these ropes quite thin when you're using a real lye bath. If the pretzel is too thick,
it might burn on the outside before it's done on the inside. And once I've got these shaped,
I'm not going to proof them. I'm not going to let them ferment and get puffy again. In Germany,
I gather they usually shape and then bake these right away. I suspect a
denser texture retains water a little better in the oven and keeps the inside from drying out,
which is a risk because this is a dry dough. If we hadn't kneaded in a lot of flour into the
dough, if this dough was still really wet, it would be liable to break during the stretching
process or the dipping process, which we do next. Hey, so let's take a timeout and let's
talk through the scary parts. So this is sodium hydroxide, AKA caustic soda. Food grade. You can
buy this on the internet. Look for the food grade kind. This is a caustic alkaline. This
can absolutely give you a chemical burn and you need to be respectful of it. However,
keep in mind that what we're doing here is something that generations of German
grandmas have done themselves at home for a long time and they're not worse for wear. First
thing you'll want to do is put on some latex gloves. These I got from the cleaning section
of the grocery store and not the food section. These are made to deal with caustic solutions
used for cleaning. So it's what you want. You don't want the food service gloves that
have the little holes in them so that your skin can breathe. Obviously a bad idea here. We're
going to mix our caustic soda with water to create a solution known as lye, and when we do that,
an exothermic reaction is going to occur, meaning it's going to create heat when we mix this with
water. So ideally you want to do that in a heat safe, non-reactive vessel, so heat-safe
Pyrex. That is to say the Pyrex that's sold for baking, not just for storage is kind of the ideal
situation here. So we'll do that, and then I've got five cups or that's 1.2 liters of water. By
the way, when I say this dish is non-reactive, what I mean is it's unlikely to corrode upon
contact with strong bases or acids the way metals would. And into that I'm going to dissolve one
quarter cup or about 70 grams of sodium hydroxide and I'm going to slowly sprinkle it in while I
stir because otherwise it has a tendency to a cake and then it's just hard to dissolve.
Plus, this is probably safer. I'm just following the proportions given for pretzels on the back
of this bottle by the way. Do not touch that powder. You've seen Fight Club, right? Now,
what's interesting is the sides of this dish are actually kind of warm now. That's how exothermic
this reaction is. Now, people have traditionally done this without gloves because pretzels predate
latex gloves. I'm not saying people would've touched the lye, but they would've used tools
to dip the pretzels in and out of the lye bath. It's really much easier to use your hands now in
the era of gloves. But what if something goes wrong? What if it touches your skin? Well,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to give myself a minor chemical burn on the inside of my arm right
here. I'm just going to let that sit there for, I don't know, 1, 2, 3,4,5,6,7,8,9, 10 seconds.
Now I'm going to go wash this off. Four hours later, that patch of skin is slightly more pale.
It itched a tiny bit and felt slightly warm, and now it's already back to normal. This just isn't
that concentrated of a caustic solution. Try not to get it on your skin, but if you do and you wash
it off promptly, you're probably going to be fine. What's funny is that in this timeline, I have no
idea how this actually panned out. For all I know, I'm dead now, but let's presume that people are
actually going to see this and that I survived. So what I'm going to do is just grab the pretzel,
dip it into the bath. The dough will probably float a bit. You can either spoon lye over the
top or give it a flip. We'll soak each one for 10 or 20 seconds. The hydroxide gelatinize the
surface of the dough, making it smooth and shiny and allowing the outside to brown much faster and
therefore deeper in the oven. You do not have to rinse these, you do not have to boil them,
and in that sense, they are easier than the baking soda based pretzel recipes
you may have seen from the likes of me. I find the safest way to get these out
is to gather them up between your two hands. The pretzel won't stretch this way, drain thoroughly,
or you risk these coming out of the oven a little wet. Check out how the color has changed. It's
yellowish now. I will sprinkle on my favorite finishing salt, which is Maldon smoked sea salt,
not an ad, but use any big crunchy salt you want. I am being liberal with the salt
because the pretzels are going to expand in the oven, thus spreading out the salt. If you want,
you can slash the belly, very traditional. This helps the belly expand more in the oven,
thus making it puffier. With my oven, 450 Fahrenheit, 230 C is good, but that's on the
high side for pretzels. Your oven might do better at a lower temperature. The pretzels are done when
they're just deep brown all over. This took 15 minutes and the hazardous hydroxide is gone.
It reacts with the dough and/or the carbon dioxide in the hot air and it becomes baking
soda. Harmless. Though you might risk having a little unreacted hydroxide in pools if you don't
drain the pretzels really well. Wow. Look at the blistering on those, and you'll get a smoother
skin if you move these from the lye to the oven pretty quickly. I was filming and that slowed me
down. You don't want to rush when working with real lye, which you need to dispose of now.
I'm going to get my faucet running into my sink and then slowly pour this down the drain, being
careful to not splash. The running water will dilute the lye and make it safer as it travels
through the pipes. Though this is essentially weak drain cleaner and people send a drain
cleaner down the pipes all the time. Plus, sodium hydroxide is often used to treat wastewater.
Mustard. The effort is a hundred percent worth it to get real pretzels freshly baked in your
home. There's nothing like bread straight from the oven. Ooh, crispy that part.