Pretzel Bagels
After many reasonable, but largely uninspiring attempts ate creating German-style soft pretzels at home, I recently tried some new recipes and came across a formula that worked (more to come soon). The strong alkaline condition from lye imparts the prezels with a deep, slightly bitter flavor that adds a distinctive character. That said, I generally prefer the leaner, denser dough of bagels to prezels. Some bagel makers boil their rings in a lye-based water bath, so I pondered creating a hybrid approach. While preparing a batch of my usual bagels, I saved a few unboiled and instead added them to a 3.5% lye bath, turning them over to provide even exposure, for about 10-15 seconds.
A 3.5% lye solution involves adding 3.5 gm of lye (sodium hydroxide) to about a liter of water. Food-grade lye can be purchased from Amazon.
Lye can cause chemical burns, so I use gloves and eye protection and minimize the risk of exposure. Here', I’m using a stainless steel skimmer to dissolve the lye granules.
I then placed the bathed bagels on a baking sheet with slightly oiled parchment (to avoid sticking, which tends to be a problem after an lye soak). These went into the oven, as per my usual protocol, at 425 °F for 20 minutes, with a flip halfway through.
Greasing the parchment with a thin coating of oil helps to prevent the lye-soaked bagels from sticking.
Lye-soaked bagels ready for baking.
The result was striking - the bagels were a deep mahogany brown and had a distinctive prezel-like flavor with perhaps a slightly softer crust. I tried them with cream cheese and smoked salmon (on one half) or cream cheese and jelly (on the other). Both the sweet and savory versions worked well. I wouldn’t characterize them as being overtly superior to either conventional bagels or preztels, but they worked well enough to be a valuable variety in their own right.
The side with the most oiled-parchment contact looked a bit strange at first, but the appearance normalized overtime to reveal an appealing mahogany brown.
