Remove them carefully with a slotted spoon and dry them on the kitchen paper before returning them onto the baking sheet. Simply drop them into the hot solution and leave them for around 30 seconds, turning them a few times. Remove the soda solution from the heat and dunk your dough balls, 3 or 4 at a time. Place a few sheets of kitchen paper next to your baking tray. When the water is boiling, carefully add the baking soda, one spoonful at a time as it will bubble up quite a bit. Heat your oven to 200C / 400F and bring 3 pints / 1.5 litre of water to the boil. The next morning, remove the sheet from the plastic bag to allow the surface of the buns to firm up a little. Then place the sheet in the fridge overnight. Place the baking sheet inside a plastic bag or similar and leave them until they have noticeable grown (another 30-45 minutes). Roll each of the parts into a small ball, between your hands or on the worktop, and place them on the baking sheet.
Knock back the dough by kneading it into a ball, which you then cut into 12 equal parts. Cover and rest until it has doubled in size (it takes 30 minutes to an hour). Add more water if necessary as you want a fairly soft dough. Alternatively you can cut out the overnight rest by adding a little more yeast (1/4 tsp) to speed up the process.ĭilute the yeast in 400ml of the water before adding the flour, sugar, salt and butter. In the morning you just need to dip them in the baking soda solution and bake them, making it the perfect breakfast treat. I do like a long fermentation period for my breads, which in this case means you can prepare the rolls in the evening and rest them overnight in the fridge. Felicity Cloake’s pretzel experiment in the Guardian suggests to bake the soda before making the solution, and I’ve definitely put that on my to try list! I use around 4 tablespoons in 3 pints of water, which gives my pretzels and rolls a nice tan. It’s easy to come by, low risk, and it gives your rolls or pretzels a lovely colour and taste. It’s the baking equivalent of playing with fire.Īlternatively, use baking soda.
With this you make a 4% solution using strong rubber gloves, making sure it doesn’t get in contact with anything other than the dough as it will invariably destroy it. You need to get a food-grade variety, which is hard to come by unless you happen to live in Germany or Switzerland. The end result is the same: a lovely crisp and chewy crust, not unlike a bagel’s, but with a lovely dark tan.Īs the words ‘drain cleaner’ and ‘caustic’ already hint at, using lye is not for the fainthearted. Which – potentially – explains their origin: a tray of buns fell into a pot of cleaning lye because a cat jumped on the tray of raw rolls (the Swabian version), or because the baker mixed up the cleaning solution with a sugary glaze (the Bavarian one). The lye that connects them is sodium hydroxide, a potentially harmful caustic alkaline solution more commonly found in drain cleaners. In the South they are ubiquitous, but increasingly you can find lye breads even in the northernmost bakeries. In Germany, we have a whole range of lye breads – pretzels, obviously, but also rolls and sticks, to name just a few. They are rolls alright, and therefore clearly not pretzels! But for some reason, dunking dough in lye prior to baking seems to linguistically file the result under ‘pretzel.’ This is probably the most misleading name for a bread, ever: pretzel rolls.
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