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Pretzel Breads

Diane B <dianeb@debunix.net>
Sat, 15 Jun 2013 09:54:11 -0700
v113.n024.1
Rose Levy Berenbaum has an excellent recipe for Pretzel Breads in the 
Bread Bible.

Really, the key to making anything a 'pretzel' bread or cracker is 
less the bread--although a fruity spicy sweet dough would clearly be 
wrong--but rather the dip in lye or at least strong soda 
solution.  It's that treatment of the wheat dough with strong base 
that gives the characteristic pretzel flavor.

I've used my saltine cracker recipe to make 'pretzel' crackers simply 
by brushing the cracker tops with a lye solution per Rose's 
recipe.  Unfortunately I don't have Rose's book handy to share the 
lye solution recipe.  You really need food-grade lye to make it work 
properly--I've never felt like a soda solution was adequate to give 
really the right flavor--but the lye requires careful handling 
because both the dry pellets and the solution for brushing or dipping 
can burn skin or eyes.

My saltine recipe is here

http://debunix.net/recipes/Saltines.html

Quite easy but it does take a bit of patience, since the dough takes 
a day to rise before preparing the crackers.


--diane in los angeles

http://debunix.net/recipes/FoodPages.html