Technical Bake #7: Pretzels

Hello Friends and Fellow Bakers! Here we are at lucky number 7! Time is flying! First off, to anyone who noticed: I am so sorry and embarrassed for re-posting the Pithivier before this post. I am inept had some technical difficulties and I am still getting familiar with this blog software and I accidentally re-published the Pithivier when I was trying to publish this post. My thanks for your grace as I make a fool of myself on the internet. ANYHOO:

Today I am talking about pretzels (link to GCBS here), which were featured on Season 4, Episode 2: Bread Week. I always feel like bread week gets a bit short changed on GCBS and GBBO. I think what it comes down to is the way the show is produced. My best breads take 24 – 48h start to finish and the longest challenge I have ever seen on either show was 8 hours long.

Flavour development in bread is a long game and one of nuance. The yeast are alive, they aren’t a static chemical ingredient with totally predictable outcomes. This biological element of the method gives bread a way of almost behaving that sets it apart from other types of baked goods. In many ways it also sets the breadmaker apart from other bakers. To truly excel at bread is to learn to cultivate and work with yeast; to respond to its needs and idiosyncrasies; to just know when the time is right. On top of managing the biology, a lot of the flavour development comes from the changing biome of the dough over time as the yeast colony grows and changes alongside the bacteria also present in the mix. A great loaf of bread is an edible ecosystem. To put all of that into a 44 minute show with three segments just isn’t going to happen. Instead the shows focus on quicker bakes that have less flavour development in the dough itself and pile on the level of complexity instead. Thus is the compromise of reality television.

On with this post. I decided I had enough of futzing about with pastry for the time being and wanted to do something a little easier, a little more familiar, and frankly, a little cheaper. Ding, ding, ding, bread it is. I went for the pretzels because it was still a new recipe for me and it was actually a bake I was interested in eating myself for a change. The whole experience of making these was so different from what I was anticipating. I re-watched the segment of the show three times before I started because it was so unclear to me what the challenge really was. From what I gathered, I was supposed to avoid over kneading, the pretzels were supposed to have bounce-back after baking, and of course the shaping was supposed to be consistent. Also the contestants didn’t have a recipe for the cheese dip, just the ingredients. I did have the recipe, but this bake isn’t about the dip. What am I missing? I realized re-watching wasn’t going to help anymore once I started thinking about taking photos of the notes I had written down, as if that would somehow help my brain absorb them better (you know, like a perfectly sane person). Basically, after my chaotic adventure in hell experience with the maple leaf sandwich cookies, I have become suspicious of challenges that seem like they are too simple to be on the show. SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED.

It’s not that this bake went badly. It went just fine. The pretzels are delicious. The cheese dip is great. It’s just that the successful execution of this was so different from what I thought I was going to be doing every step of the way, EVEN THOUGH I WATCHED THE FOOTAGE THREE TIMES. It was like a bizarre dream or something. The Twilight Zone of Bakes. Adding to this eerie experince was the fact that I couldn’t find anything like this method anywhere, but the judges on the show were talking about their expectations so clearly and made it sound like this is the traditional method. I even consulted with a close friend of mine who is Austrian. She gave me a German method that was more similar to this than anything I was able to find, but it still wasn’t quite the same. Also, my friend’s description of proper German pretzels didn’t seem to totally line up with what they said on the show. So once again I say, WTF CBC. 

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Step 1: Dough 

The recipe and the show both made a big deal of not overworking this dough in order to retain some flakiness inside (side note: Austrian friend and my own research suggest this is Not A Thing^TM). The dry ingredients are worked with a little bit of butter to coarse crumbs. Next milk, molasses, and water are added to hydrate it. The amount of liquid called for wasn’t enough to pick up all of the flour, so I ended up adding a little more water but I kept it to a minimum to try and stick to the bizarre recipe. This is where things started to get weird. 

The recipe is written almost like a hybrid between a pastry and a bread dough. Instead of kneading, it called to “pat the dough into a two inch thick inch mass” (?), fold in thirds, rotate, fold in thirds again, rest., and repeat. I admit that this is KIND OF similar to stretching and folding regular bread dough, but it was the FIRMEST, DRYEST, MOST DIFFICULT dough I have ever put my hands on. And this is way more similar to the roll out for a laminated dough or rough puff. Nonetheless, I decided to stick to my guns and follow the recipe and not my gut, because that is what this project is about. 

The dough did start to develop into a more workable texture as the folding cycles continued, but it was still INTENSELY elastic and I had a really hard time with it. I ended up having to stand on a footstool just to get enough leverage to complete the folds. Now, I am not like a powerlifter or something, but I am no stranger to a set of dumbbells, so believe me when I say this dough was bonkers.

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Step 2: Shaping

Once the final rest was done it was time for shaping. I have shaped plain bread dough into pretzel shapes many times. When I was in high school and first learning about bread, it was a favourite quick bake of mine that I liked to do because I could knock a little batch out in about an hour. Going into this bake, I figured this version would be a new fun spin to learn on it. The recipe calls for stretching the dough wide between your two hands and then clapping them together. The momentum of the clap makes the dough spin to get the double twist. Groovy stuff!

This was fun to do, but once again, I felt like I was experiencing the whole thing through a strange lens. Do pretzels unlock some wormhole in the multiverse? Are you onto something Germany? I NEED TO KNOW. As I said above, the dough was extremely elastic. It took me at least five minutes just to get these rolled out to the 30 inch length they needed to be according to the instructions. That isn’t even the weird part. The weird part is the recipe gave me these really detailed instructions about 30 inches and clapping and twisting and so on, and the contestants only got told to shape them into a double twist. So one of the only things I really expected to see in the episode (the clapping thing) didn’t happen because none of them knew to do it. 

The other weird thing is since the dough is so elastic, I was expecting the pinched ends to be really difficult to do. They were not. I just… pinched the ends. And they stayed put. Like. What is going on with this recipe….

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Step 3: Lye bath

The pretzels are left to sit for up to 3 hours (they did 30 minutes on the show; I did about 60) so they will form a skin. Then they are dipped in a lye bath for 5 seconds on each side. Most home bakers do a baking soda bath which is similar and much safer as lye is highly toxic and will cause severe chemical burns (we all saw fight club, right?). Either way, the alkaline solution is what causes the pretzels to get their characteristic dark brown colour in the oven. Once they have been treated with the lye, a sprinkle of salt and it’s time to bake.

So there you have it. Is it possible the CBC is trolling all of us with this recipe? An unexpected plot twist on pretzel week? That would be extremely meta for the CBC, but this was also the season that was cast and produced during the pandemic. Maybe someone over there had a transcendental experience planning this episode and wanted to share it. We will probably never know. The important thing is: the pretzels, despite their inauspicious beginning in the crevices of my confusion, were so good Dave ate 7 of them and I had 3 before I hid the rest in the freezer. 

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Hey. bakers! Check out my BAKER’S PANTRY index if you want to deep dive on specific ingredients when attempting this bake for yourself