Swabian pretzels with little arms

Yes, real German-style soft pretzels are boiled

Or dipped in lye before they are baked.

Lye — sodium hydroxide.

Problem is, food-grade lye is hard to find and it's legit dangerous to work with. You get chemical burns. These pretzels I boiled in the next best thing, which is sodium carbonate — washing soda, which you can make very easily at home from plain ol' baking soda. I'll show you. Dough first. Any dough is fine, but this is mine. A cup of water — 237mL.

Teaspoon of yeast, a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon or two of melted butter or oil. Purists may get upset about the fat and the sugar but I was raised on mall pretzels and I refuse to be sorry for who I am. A teaspoon of this kosher salt — that's not very much, but you want the dough to be under-seasoned because you're gonna have the salt on top. Highly optional, but I've been using a teaspoon of baking powder in addition to the yeast, just for some extra poof in the oven. I've seen a few German recipes call for that. Now. I'll just stir in as much bread flour as I can stir in with a spoon. I increasingly start all my breads this way.

It keeps your hands clean for the messiest part of bread making. No more pulling little dried sticky bits out of the hairs on your fingers. That's about as much as I can get in — I'll cover that with a wet towel and let it autolyse for about 20 minutes before proceeding. Meanwhile, baking soda. Standard sodium bicarbonate. Just dump a bunch of it in a dry pan and turn the heat on high. It's time boil the water out. Yes, there's water in there — see how it starts to clump as it heats? Sodium bicarbonate is not actually sodium bicarbonate.

That's an old scientific misnomer that just stuck. Baking soda is actually sodium hydrogencarbonate. And when you get it hot, the hydrogen and oxygen form water and literally boil off, along with some carbon dioxide. Wanna see? Just wait until it gets really hot and then shake the pan. Pretty cool, huh? Harold McGee famously suggested doing this for pretzels some years back, and he tells you to bake your baking soda in the oven for an hour, at least. But it only takes 15 minutes on the stove, it's super fun to watch, and you can monitor the process better. If you overcook this it could start to break down into some less desirable compounds. You'll know exactly when it's done whenever you stop seeing little gas geysers.

You shake the pan or stir it, but there's no visible signs of gas anymore — when that happens, you're done, and you can check by weighing it. If you've really converted your baking soda into washing soda then it should weigh a little less than 2/3rds of its original weight. I started with one pound, 454g and nailed it.

Let that cool and try not to

Let it sit on your skin or get in your eyes or anything — it's mildly caustic.

After 20 minutes this dough has autolysed —it's super stretchy and quite easy to knead now. I'll just knead in some more flour — pretzel dough is generally on the dry side. The dough should still be a little tacky, not super sticky. That's probably a little too sticky.

A little more flour. There we go — just barely sticky.

Anyway, risen dough comes out and I will cut it into quarters — I'm making four large pretzels today. And I'm borrowing a trick from French baguette technique. No idea if. Germans do this with pretzels but — flatten the quarter out into a triangle, grab the point of the triangle and roll inward to give you a little loaf with tapered ends. When it comes time to actually shape the pretzels, we'll be halfway there already.

Cover and let rise again, at least 20 or 30 minutes — that's enough time for the gluten to relax. Every time you work a dough like this, the gluten tenses up. You gotta wait until it's pliable again to shape out the pretzels. And I'm still working on the move, but the basic idea is you only roll the outer ends. I'm trying for a shape that's more Swabian than Bavarian.

The Swabian pretzels have thin little arms

And fat bellies, which means each pretzel has a thick fluffy part and thin crispy parts — heterogeneity.

Just roll the ends and leave the

Belly in the center alone.

Get the rope a lot longer than you think you want it, because it's gonna snap back.

Plus the whole thing is gonna puff up a lot, so the negative spaces are gonna fill in. Make a U, twist the ends, fold them over, done. Now I'll let those proof for another half hour, after which time they'll be nice and puffy. And if you want to make your life really easy, here's another non-traditional tip — throw them in the freezer — not until they're rock hard, but until they're firm enough to not fall apart during the boiling phase, speaking of which – a wide, deep pan of water for boiling, and a wide, deep bowl of water for rinsing.

Heat on high, and into the pan goes as much of my washing soda as I can easily dissolve. The solution doesn't have to be fully saturated — yes, pedants, I know "fully saturated" is technically redundant. You don't want any undissolved calcium carbonate grains hanging out in there because they could stick to the pretzel and they would taste bitter. You should see the water go clear after a couple minutes of stirring.

And here's why we cooked our baking soda — this solution has a pH of 11. That's less than the 13 you'd get with lye, but way more than the 8 you'd get with regular old baking soda. All this extra washing soda I can seal up tight in a non-reactive container and save. It's great for for making pretzels and for making pretzels. The water does not have to be at a rolling boil — just real hot. Here's my nice firm pretzel — easy to work with, and in the bath it goes. The alkalinity and the heat alter the surface of the pretzel such that the Maillard reaction will proceed much faster in the oven. The pretzel will brown before the inside is overcooked and dry.

It'll also get that smooth, shiny surface that defines a pretzel, to me. Now here's a step you don't have to do if you use lye — you gotta rinse the pretzel in fresh water. Lye breaks down in the oven and you don't taste it. But the washing soda would taste bitter if you left it on the surface. I'll sprinkle on my salt right now, while the pretzel is still wet. The moisture is what makes the salt stick. Some Germans use big chunky salts, some use fine salts — use whatever you want. Next one in.

This is so much easier when the pretzels are really cold — I highly recommend that. I get cosmetically better results when I boil these for like 10, 15 seconds max. Any longer and they wrinkle up a lot more, they start to fall apart, no good. Wash off that washing soda. The washing soda solution is mildly caustic but it's not like a lye bath. If you get this on your skin, it might feel kinda warm, you'd probably want to wash it off pretty soon, but it's not an instant chemical burn — not even close. Salt on — more salt than looks correct, because remember the pretzel is gonna grow in the oven. Now, when people use lye, they often don't even bother heating the water.

It's just a lukewarm bath.

That's because the lye is much stronger,

And they can leave it on the surface, because it breaks down in the oven.

We need the extra boost of heat to get a similar levels of browning. Some people also brush an egg wash onto the pretzel for extra browning help — I tried that and got no noticeable benefit. It would help if you were just boiling these in baking soda, but the washing soda just does a better job and the egg is unnecessary. Last step is another Swabian trick — slash the belly. Score the fat belly of the pretzel so it's free to puff up more in the oven — its growth won't be restricted by tight outer skin. Into a fully-preheated oven, 425ºF/220ºC at least.

You can go higher if you want them even darker and crispier. Here we are like 15 minutes later and they're beautiful. Just pull them whenever they're brown to your liking. No, we don't have the dark mahogany crust you get from lye, but we also don't have chemical burns all over our hands. Here's one final trick — spray or bush on some water while the pretzels are still really hot. The water will set into a glaze and you'll get a shinier look. You could even do that one or two times during the baking process for an even more dramatic effect. Alright, I suppose it's a middle ground between a Bavarian and a Swabian pretzel.

Inside, it's super fluffy and rich, thanks to the butter and sugar. One day we'll make straight-up mall pretzels, I promise. If the outer crust is a little too firm for you, just know that they'll soften a bit as they sit around and water from the inside migrates out to the crust. But I sure like them straight out of the oven. Where's my mustard?..