Restaurant owners, at least the smart ones, know we eat with our eyes, then with our noses, before the food ever passes between our lips.

It's even more true in these days of television advertising. A syrupy icy cola, spicy and biting in its effervescence, is appealing enough in actuality, but when it's depicted with ice flying forcefully into the glass of cola, the cola splashing all over in a tsunami of flavor, it's even harder to resist.

That BK Ad

The latest ads for Burger King, showing cola falling sideways into a cup, with a Whopper in the foreground, is exceptionally appealing. If you were to call it food porn, you'd get no argument from the videographers; that's exactly what they call it, themselves.

The Supreme Court uses the word "prurient" to describe porn, pruritis being a medical term for itching. Porn is only porn to the extent that it makes you itch, makes you feel desire - and that's exactly what food advertising is all about.

The Twisted Logic of Yeastbreads

Of late, one of the hot items to hit the television screen is pretzel bread. It's being used in microwavable frozen sandwiches. They used to promote the pie crusts used as a bread substitute, and then tortilla wraps became the hot thing, and now it's pretzel bread. Have you noticed the common theme? They are all things you cannot easily make for yourself at home.

You can, of course, buy Pillsbury All Ready pie crusts, or buy tortillas, but those both look fairly hard to use. Pretzel bread seems even more difficult, doesn't it? That's a key for the restaurant business, and it's increasingly important in the convenience food market.

Cinnamon Rolls A Fraud

About 40 years ago, I was a retail manager, walking through a mall with another manager. We passed a bakery that emited wonderful scents of cinnamon rolls. "That smells so wonderful," Jim told me, and I agreed.

"But did you ever try them? They are a real disappointment. If they tasted as good as they smelled, they'd have a wonderful chain of bakeries."

Jim told me I was mistaken. The cinnamon rolls were too dry because they didn't have enough fat. Butter is expensive, so they deliberately used very little. "They don't see mall workers as their market, but rather shoppers. If you only buy once every 4 or 6 months, you forget how bad the cinnamon rolls really are."

Hot bread is terribly appealing, and if you have repeat customers, it's a high markup item, even if you do it right. Hot pizza, hot donuts, and hot soft pretzels can be the basis of a highly profitable business. Cincinnati used to have two Bagel Factory locations that sold bushels of fresh hot bagels at a high markup. A guy would have to be crazy to open a burger joint when hot bread is both cheaper to produce and more appealing than a hamburger sandwich.

Can I Make Good Pretzel Bread?

All of these ads for pretzel bread have made me wonder how pretzel bread is made. I've wondered for a long time about how pita pocket bread is made as well. Consequently, I set out to make some pretzel bread tonight.

The "secret" of pretzels is that the dough is boiled first in alkali water before being baked. When bakeries produce bread, they have special ovens that inject steam during the baking process. The steam puts a nice brown crust on the bread. Boiling the dough in alkali water not only produces the brown color of pretzels, but the characteristic pretzel taste.

Traditionally, pretzels are boiled in lye. The problem with lye, though, is that it's pretty corrosive. You really need to be wearing rubber gloves, and carefully clean up any spatter or spill, and keep your tongue in the correct corner of your mouth in order to minimize accidents. A saturated solution of baking soda does the same thing much more safely, and although it might be more expensive for an industrial pretzel manufacturer, the costs of rubber gloves, etc., make lye more expensive, not less, for most people making pretzels at home.

A Rather Simple Recipe

I started off with 1.5 cups of warm (about 110F) water, a tablespoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, and a tablespoon of active dry yeast. I recommend you get the rapid rise yeast for everything - there's nothing that the active dry yeast works better in - but a yeast cake, a packet of either kind of yeast, or a tablespoon of either bulk yeast will do. After 5-10 minutes, the water should be foaming up; that'll tell you that the yeast is good.

Add 4.5 cups of flour and a half-stick of melted butter, and mix with the dough hook until the dough is smooth and pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Then roll it between your hands to form a ball, oil the outside with about a tablespoon of vegetable oil, and let it rise in a warm place until it doubles in size, which should take about an hour or so.

Dodging The Draft

In modern homes, it's hard to find a warm draft-free place to raise bread. It took me a long time to learn that I should not use a stainless steel mixing bowl for this. A plastic mixing bowl is OK, but a pyrex mixing bowl, or an earthenware mixing bowl seems to be the most satisfactory. I think it's because they hold the temperature best. Plastic doesn't hold temperature, but it's a good insulator. With stainless steel, the bowl can change temperature too easily.

If you're making pretzel bread, what you want to do is to flatten out the risen dough. I would recommend splitting it into 4 equal parts for easiest handling. They make a tool known as a counter scraper that's a flat sheet of metal about 3" by 6", with a wooden handle along one of the longer sides. It's not common in the kitchen, but I've found it very handy. Amazon has the Wilton scraper for about $7 but it's only $2-3 for one at a restaurant supply house.

In any case, to make pretzel bread, you simply pretend that you're rolling out biscuits, only instead of punching out circles with an empty tin can, you simply cut a piece that's 3" by 4".

Boiled In Soda

Each of these pieces of dough needs to be boiled for about a minute or so in baking soda water. Put 3/4 cup of baking soda in three quarts - measure it! - and set it to boiling.

I tried using a hamburger turner to deposit the dough into the soda solution, but I think it would work better if I used the wire mesh scoop I use for french-frying. I used a wide shallow pan to boil the solution, and that was an unwise move as well.

The solution was boiling up in the center, where it was hottest, and sinking down at the edges where it was cooler. The dough kept moving from the center of the pan to the edge. It probably would be better to use a smaller diameter pan, so that all part of the dough were equally treated by the solution. On the other hand, I could see no evidence whatsoever that one side was boiled harder than the other edge.

A Swell Idea

Boiling the dough makes it swell up. I was happiest with the dough that was about 1/4" thick before boiling and 3/8" thick after boiling. After baking, it was thicker still.

While I was at it, I also made some pretzel-shaped pretzels. This recipe is supposed to make about 10 pretzels.

As I removed the dough from the soda solution, I put it on a half-sheet pan that had been coated with vegetable oil. When I got through, I put the pan in a 450F oven for 12 minutes, and it came out just fine. I lubed the tops of the pretzels fresh out of the oven, and since I didn't have any pretzel salt, I just hit them with table salt.

Rating The Recipe

The pretzels were a lot better than the tasteless and tough Hot Sam pretzels (and the Superpretzels found in the freezer section of the store). They were chewier than Auntie Anne pretzels, and a little tastier - pretty much on a par with the pretzels frequently sold in front of Sharp Shopper.

The thing is, though, you can't buy pretzel bread anyplace except as part of a junkfood sandwich. This pretzel bread tastes pretty good as a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and I'm betting it would be great as an egg salad sandwich or a ham and cheese sandwich.

Soft pretzels don't deal gracefully with the passage of time, and I can't imagine that pretzel bread made Saturday night will be very good on Tuesday, or even on Monday, but I'm hoping that it'll be OK for lunch on Sunday. Blondie had fallen asleep by the time I pulled the pretzels and pretzel bread from the oven, so she won't appreciate them otherwise.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
All Ready pie crust - Auntie Anne - baking soda - Burger King - cinnamon rolls - dough scraper - food porn - Hot Pockets - Hot Sam - pretzel - scratch biscuits - Sharp Shopper - Superpretzel - Wilton - wraps