[Sca-cooks] bagels

[Terry Decker]

I think you were nailed by the difference between hard and soft pretzels. 
Soft pretzels use a bread dough with a water bath.  Hard pretzels use a 
stiffer dough suitable for making crackers and a bath with sodium hydroxide 
or sodium carbonate.  Both baths create a crust by gelatinizing the surfarce 
starch.  Malted water adds sugars to the surface which carmelize into a 
darker brown finish.  The sodium solutions produce the dark brown glossy 
crust.

Commercial pretzel makers spray the formed pretzels with a 1% solution of 
sodium hydroxide or sodium carbonate at about 200 degrees F then salt and 
flash bake the pretzels at high temperature for about 5 minutes to get the 
desired surface.  Then the pretzels are baked at about 200 degrees F to dry 
them out and give the proper snap.  The sodium residues combine with carbon 
dioxide in the oven to produce a harmless carbonate.

The heat of the process should coagulate any gluten the water or sodium 
solutions come in contact with, so as to reduce the absorbtion of the 
liquid.

If you try this again with the lye, I suggest a very stiff dough, a quick 
dunk in the solution, and a hot oven (start around 500 degrees F and go up 
or down as needed) for a few minutes, followed later by a slow second bake.

Bear


> From what I've read, commercial pretzels are sprayed with lye solution 
> before baking; the lye denatures the starch at the surface to form the 
> hard, glossy finish prized in such pretzels.  And the baking process 
> allegedly neutralizes the toxicity of the lye.  I gather the "traditional" 
> homemade equivalent is boiling in lye solution.
>
> I've tried it myself twice, with poor results (which might have been 
> because I was using my low-carb bread recipe rather than making a batch of 
> dough just for pretzel purposes).  On one occasion at home I boiled the 
> pretzels for a minute or two in a fairly strong baking soda solution, and 
> they turned out inedibly bitter.  At Pennsic last I boiled the pretzels 
> for a minute or two in a weak solution of Mistress Thora's fireplace ash 
> (which she has used as a source of lye in the past for dyeing purposes); 
> they weren't inedibly bitter, but decidedly uninteresting.  I'll have to 
> try again some time with ordinary bread dough.
> -- 
>                                     John Elys