#Laugenbrezen (lye pretzels)
[intro to follow]
##Ingredients
###For the dough:
- 300ml milk
- 1tbsp + 1tsp sugar
- 40g butter (unsalted)
- 1tsp salt
- 500g strong bread flour
- 1 1/4 tsp yeast (dried active yeast)
###For the lye bath
- 1l boiling water
- 2 tbsp bicarbonate of soda
###Optional
- Rock salt to sprinkle
- Flour to dust the surface
###Utensils
- kitchen scale
- measuring spoons
- baking tray
- silicon baking mat (optional)
- sharp knife
Makes 6 pretzels.
##Step 1: Der Hefeteig – or – the dough
Pretzels are basically just funny shaped bread that has been dipped in a lye bath before baking. With this mystery uncovered, we first need to create a lovely buttery bread dough. Most bread dough recipes will work for this, so feel free to experiment with different kinds of flour (e.g. wholemeal, or sunflower seeds).
For a traditional white flour buttery bread dough you'll need the milk, sugar, butter, salt, flour and yeast in the quantities stated above.
The most efficient thing to do is putting it all in a breadmaker, in this exact order, and set it to the dough setting. Then have a bier and a sausage and come back an hour and a half later to remove your perfect dough.
If you're the type of person, however, who likes to exercise their strong Teutonic hands, you're more than welcome to do all the kneading yourself as follows:
In a bowl mix flour, sugar and yeast. Add salt, butter and gradually the milk, then beat and knead the hell out of it until you get a nice firm dough, this can take a while (at least 10 minutes! probably more) and and really calls for strong wrists and lower arm muscles. Are you sure you don't want to use a bread maker? Cover the dough ball with a kitchen towel and leave it to rise at room temperature for an hour.
When you return after an hour your dough should have doubled in size and feel like a healthy Bavarian beer belly when you slap it.
##Step 2: From wurst to pretzel
Now that you have created a wonderful dough using either your wonderfully efficient breadmaker or your strong, now probably aching, hands it's onto bringing this lump of yeasty goodness into shape.
On a clean surface roll the dough into a big sausage, so that you can easily divide it up into six equal parts. If you find that the dough is too sticky to handle, you can use a little flour to dust your hands and the surface. Don't use too much flour though or you'll find it difficult to make the right sausage shapes later on.
Now make a long thin sausage out of each of the smaller dough balls. The sausage should be about 40cm long and about 15-20mm thick in the middle. Towards each end the sausage should be about the thickness of a thumb. Again, it's a very long sausage that is thicker in the middle than it is on each end. Not really a sausage then, more like a small python that has just devoured a longish thickish thing, like a sausage I guess. You get the idea don't you?
Note: If the dough keeps sticking to your hands, try to wet your hands slightly. This is much more effective than flour and helps to tame the elasticity of the dough.
Once you elongated your dough ball in the described way, you need to bring it into pretzel shape. You do that by grabbing either end of the sausage and draw them together away from you so that the dough forms a circle. Then twist the ends together once or twice and bring the twisted end towards you over the lower part if the circle. Place the pretzel on a floured tray (flour, yay!) and proceed with the rest of the lot.
The Germans call these things teiglings – isn't that cute? The teiglings need to rest in the fridge or a cool room for an hour, so pour yourself another bier while you're cleaning the mess you just made.
##Step 3: Bath time
Just before the resting hour is over, you can start preparing the lye bath for your teiglings. This is the actual secret that makes bread into pretzel. The lye bath creates a dark brown crust once baked. There are various ways of making this bath but the easiest and least deadly way is to use bicarbonate of soda. Dissolve 2tbsp of bicarbonate of soda in 1l of boiling water. Be careful when adding the NaHCO3 to the water as it might splash and burn your skin. Only add a little bit at a time.
When everything is dissolved and bubbling away grab one of your teiglings with a slotted spoon and lower it into the bath. Boil it for about 40-60 seconds, you may want to experiment with this. Then remove it with a slotted spoon and place it on a greased baking tray. Now this is important: Don't use baking paper or aluminium foil. Sodium bicarbonate does bad things to aluminium and it eats baking paper, you don't want that. A good alternative is a silicon baking mat, or good old butter.
##Step 4: Bake bake bake
Preheat the oven to 200 degrees (180 for fan assisted ovens).
Sprinkle some rock salt over your teiglings to taste.
Using a knife, make a cut on the surface across the thick bottom part of each pretzel.
Bake the pretzels on the middle shelf for about 20 minutes. Keep an eye on them, they're done when they have a dark, even, brown colour.
##Step 5: Enjoy