Laugenbrezeln

Working with the lye

Read this before you start. The dough is easy. The lye is the part that deserves respect, and it is the part most recipes skip past.

What to buy. Food-grade sodium hydroxide, in German Natriumhydroxid, sold as Laugenperlen or Brezellauge in German baking shops and online, usually in 250 g or 500 g tubs of white pearls. The label must say Lebensmittelqualität or carry the additive number E 524. Drain cleaner is not the same product and is not safe. In Canada it is sold as food-grade lye or food-grade sodium hydroxide, often in the soap-making section or from brewing suppliers.

The solution. German bakeries work at 3 to 4 percent. The IREKS bakery technology compendium gives 3.5 to 4.0 percent for small items and caps the working solution at 4 percent. Use 40 g of pearls to 1000 ml of cold water, which is 4 percent, and mix it in the bowl you will dip from.

The procedure, in order.

1. Put on safety goggles that seal around the eye, not reading glasses. Put on chemical-resistant gloves. Long sleeves. Clear children and pets out of the kitchen.
2. Put the 1000 ml of cold water into the bowl first.
3. Add the 40 g of pearls to the water. Never water to lye. Solid sodium hydroxide meeting a small amount of water heats violently and can spit. The BGN occupational safety sheet states the rule plainly: water first, then the lye.
4. Stir with a stainless or plastic spoon until the pearls dissolve. The solution warms itself as it dissolves. Let it come back below 30°C before you dip.
5. Use a plastic tub, ideally polypropylene or polyethylene, or a stainless steel bowl. Never aluminium. Lye attacks aluminium and releases hydrogen gas, which is explosive in a closed space. Glass clouds permanently. Do not use a ceramic bowl you care about.
6. Do not lean over the bowl. Keep the cold tap free.

If it touches you. Rinse the spot under cold running water for at least 15 minutes. Do not neutralise it on your skin with vinegar. Anything in the eye is 15 minutes of rinsing and then a hospital, not a wait-and-see.

Afterwards. Pour the bath slowly down the drain with the tap running full. It keeps a few weeks in a sealed, clearly labelled plastic container if you would rather reuse it, and it does not weaken much with use, but a bath with dough crumbs in it goes cloudy and should be dumped.

Why the finished pretzel is harmless. In the oven the sodium hydroxide on the surface reacts with carbon dioxide from the dough and from the air and turns into sodium carbonate. The caustic effect is gone before the pretzel is brown, and what is left is the faintly mineral, almost soapy taste that is the whole point of Laugengebäck. The danger is entirely in the raw bath, not in the bread.

Method

1. Evening before. Mix the 100 g flour, 80 ml cold water, and 1 g yeast to a stiff paste. Cover, leave 1 hour at room temperature, then 12 to 16 hours in the fridge. This is what gives the crumb its flavour, and a cold preferment also keeps the finished dough cool, which matters more here than in most breads.
2. Main dough. Tear the preferment into pieces and put it in the bowl with the 400 g flour, 200 ml cold water, the yeast, and the malt. Knead 5 minutes on the slowest speed. Add the salt and the lard and knead 5 to 6 minutes more, until the dough is smooth, tight, and clears the side of the bowl. It should feel firm and slightly dry, not tacky. Target dough temperature 24 to 26°C. Warm dough is the single most common reason home pretzels go wrong: it proofs while you are still shaping and the arms puff into sausages.
3. Cover and leave 45 to 60 minutes at room temperature. It should grow by about half, not double.
4. Divide into 8 pieces of about 100 g. Roll each into a short tight cylinder, cover, and rest 10 minutes. Skipping this rest means the strand fights you and springs back.
5. Roll the strands. Work on a bare, unfloured bench so the dough grips. Start with both hands together in the middle of the cylinder and roll outwards, pressing harder as your hands travel out. Aim for 55 to 60 cm. The middle stays fat, about 3 cm across, and the last 10 cm at each end taper down to 4 or 5 mm. That taper is the recipe. Fat in the middle gives you the soft belly; thin at the ends gives you arms that bake to a crisp. If a strand resists, cover it and roll another, then come back in five minutes.
6. Shape. Lay the strand in a wide U with the belly toward you and the two ends pointing away. Pick up both ends, lift them clear of the bench, and flick your wrists so the arms whip once around each other and then a second time. Lay the twist back down onto the belly and press the two tips firmly onto the belly at roughly four o’clock and eight o’clock, about a third of the way in from each side. Press hard enough that they stick; arms that are only laid on come loose in the lye. The two holes on either side of the twist should be the same size. If the flick will not work, cross the arms twice by hand. Same pretzel, less noise.
7. Cold rest, do not skip it. Set the pretzels on parchment on a tray and put them in the fridge uncovered for 45 to 60 minutes, or in the freezer for 15 to 20 minutes. They are ready when the surface is matte, dry, and firm to a fingertip. A soft, damp skin swells in the lye, the shape slumps, the arms flatten, and the crust bakes pale and patchy.
8. Heat the oven to 230°C conventional, with a baking steel or a heavy inverted sheet on the middle rack. No fan.
9. Mix the lye as described above.
10. Dip. One pretzel at a time, belly down, 3 to 5 seconds fully submerged. Use a stainless slotted spoon or your gloved hand. Lift, let it drain for a second, and lay it on parchment. Do not stack them and do not let them sit in a puddle.
11. Cut the belly. One stroke with a razor blade or a very sharp thin knife, straight along the fattest part of the belly, about 5 mm deep, blade held almost flat. Do not saw at it. This cut is the whole personality of the Swabian pretzel: it is where the dough bursts open and lifts into a pale ridge against the dark crust.
12. Salt. Scatter the coarse salt over the belly and along the arms while the surface is still wet from the lye. This has to happen after the dip, not before. Salt put on beforehand dissolves off in the bath in seconds, and the dissolved salt fouls the lye for the next pretzel.
13. Bake 12 to 15 minutes. No steam: the lye has already put plenty of moisture on the surface, and steam here just softens the crust you are trying to build. Done looks like deep mahogany on the belly, the cut opened into a pale ridge, and the tips of the arms very dark, close to black.
14. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes.

Failure modes. Pulled at 10 minutes they are tan, rubbery, and taste of raw flour under a thin lye skin. Two minutes past 15 and the thin arms go past dark into bitter and shatter when you bite them, while the belly is still fine, which is why the arms and the belly need that thickness difference. Pale patches usually mean the surface was still wet when it went into the lye, or the dip was under three seconds.

Notes

• Swabian versus Bavarian. This is the Schwäbische Brezel: a fat, soft belly, arms rolled thin and crossed high so they bake crisp, and a deep cut along the belly that opens in the oven. It carries more fat, traditionally lard, which is what makes the belly tender enough to split and butter. The Bayerische Brezn is a different animal. The strand is close to the same thickness the whole way round, the arms are noticeably thicker, the fat content is lower, and it is not cut at all: it is baked so that the belly tears open by itself into a rough rustic split. Lutz Geißler puts it exactly that way, uniformly thick and torn rather than cut. The Bavarian is also usually crisper right through, where the Swabian, arms aside, is airy and loose inside. To bake the Bavarian version from this recipe: drop the fat to 10 g, use butter rather than lard, roll to an even 2 cm thickness with only a short taper, cross the arms lower on the belly, and skip step 11 entirely. One warning about identifying them in a bakery window: t-online notes that most bakeries now machine-shape their dough, and machines tear thin arms, so a lot of pretzels sold in Swabia have Bavarian proportions whatever the sign says.
• The baking soda alternative, honestly. You can dip in a soda solution instead, and you should know exactly what you are giving up. Two versions. Plain Natron, sodium bicarbonate: 50 g in 1 litre of boiling water, hold each pretzel under for 30 seconds. Or bake the soda first, spread on foil at 130°C for one hour, which drives off water and carbon dioxide and converts it to sodium carbonate, then use 50 g of that per litre of hot water. Baked soda is roughly a hundred times more alkaline than plain and is clearly the better of the two. Neither is equivalent. The 4 percent lye bath sits around pH 13.5, baked soda solution around pH 11, plain bicarbonate around pH 8.5, and that gap does real work. Lye partly breaks down the protein and starch at the very surface of the dough, and that is what produces the thin, tight, glassy skin with the slight chew and the specific mineral flavour. Soda gives you colour, some of it, and almost none of the skin. What you get is a good soft bread roll in a pretzel shape. The cut also opens less because the surface is not tight enough to tear cleanly. Baked soda gets you maybe seventy percent of the way, plain bicarbonate maybe forty. Anyone who eats Brezeln in Stuttgart will know from one bite.
• Flour. German Weizenmehl Type 550 is the standard here, roughly 10.5 to 11.5 percent protein. Type 405 makes a softer, paler pretzel and the arms do not crisp as well. In Canada, plain all-purpose flour is the closest thing on the shelf, but Canadian all-purpose is milled from hard red spring wheat and runs near 13 percent protein, so the dough drinks a little more: add 10 to 15 ml of extra water and stop kneading as soon as it is smooth. Do not reach for Canadian bread flour, the arms come out tough rather than crisp.
• Backmalz is enzyme-active barley malt flour, sold in any German baking aisle. It feeds the yeast a little and speeds up browning. It is optional and the pretzels are good without it. If you cannot find it, leave it out rather than substituting diastatic malt syrup, which adds water to a dough that is deliberately dry. Barley malt powder from a Canadian brewing shop works if it says diastatic.
• Lard or butter. Schweineschmalz is the traditional Swabian fat and gives a slightly shorter, more tender belly and a longer-keeping crumb. Butter at the same weight is the common home substitute and is very close; it browns a touch faster. With butter the recipe is vegetarian. A firm vegan block fat also works.
• Brezelsalz is coarse, hard, slow-dissolving salt sold specifically for this. Pretzel salt from a North American baking supplier is the same thing. Coarse sea salt is acceptable but dissolves faster and can go damp on the crust. Do not use flaky salt, it vanishes in the lye moisture. Do not use table salt at all.
• Timing. Everything up to and including the cold rest can happen the night before: shape the pretzels, freeze them solid on the tray, bag them, and they keep a month. Dip them frozen straight into the lye, add 2 minutes to the bake. That is the only sane way to have fresh pretzels before ten in the morning.
• Eat them the day they are baked, ideally within three hours. Lye pastry goes soft and then leathery fast, because the alkaline crust is hygroscopic. Day-old pretzels are for splitting, buttering, and eating anyway, or for cubing into Semmelknödel.
• Serving. Split lengthwise through the belly, cold butter, nothing else. With Obatzda they are the standard Stuttgart Vesper. Alongside Schwäbischer Wurstsalat they are not optional.

Sources used

• Brotbacklust: Schwäbische Brezeln
• Kochschwabe: Schwäbische Laugenbrezel selber machen
• Plötzblog: Auf der Walz, Bayerische Brezn
• Brooot.de: Brezeln selber backen, bayerische und schwäbische
• IREKS Kompendium der Bäckereitechnologie: Natronlauge
• BGN Branchenwissen: Brezellauge, Gefährdungen und Schutzmaßnahmen
• Die Brotschafterin: Technik, Belaugen
• Backen mit Freunden: Laugen, Tricks und Kniffe
• t-online: Unterschied bayerische Brez’n und schwäbische Brezel
• Simply Yummy: Brezel formen
• Experimentalchemie: Versuch 058, Laugengebäck aus Natronlauge