Hi,
I want to make pretzels, but all the recipes I look at seem to have the same ingredients as a challah (basically 65% hydration dough plus oil and sugar and of course yeast and salt). Is there something in the preparation that is different, or some variation in quantities that create a difference? Or is it all about soaking in baking soda water?
Doesn’t challah have a high proportion of eggs or egg yolks?
-Brad
Yes. Closer to a brioche dough except it has no dairy.
Mine has 1kg flour, 600g water, 50g oil, 50g sugar, 1 spoon of dry yeadt and one spoon of salt
Has eggs. Missing out eggs and then comparing it to pretzel dough doesn't make challah a pretzel dough. Have you tried challah with eggs?
And until today I've never heard that Challa is with eggs. It comes out fluffy without them, so no need to improve.
My question is more on what makes the pretzel chewy.
So you make a challah substitute. Challah dough is still different to pretzel dough.
I suppose it's the strong bread flour and technique.
is much lower. Less than 1%
The German word for pretzel is “Laugenbrezel”, meaning “lye pretzel”. The lye is what makes a pretzel a pretzel. The lye solution used for pretzels is typically a 3-4% dilution.
The dough makes little difference. You can “pretzelify” anything. Pretzels are usually proofed, then dipped and baked, but you can actually dip a product after baking and bake for about 3 more minutes with the same effect. I have pretzeled my sourdough to taste the change and it is a world apart. I don’t usually do this as if lye seeps into a crust opening into the crumb, it doesn’t bake off much and I am scared of that.
As for standard German pretzel doughs, there are several variations but the one I use is a genuine one. I used to be fluent in German and I am still good enough at reading it to harvest information from searches for “Laugenbrezel Rezept,” “echte Laugenbrezel Rezept,” “autentische Laugenbrezel Rezept,” etc.
You have to scale this down:
5100 g flour
126 g salt
98 g IDY
180g butter
2880g cold water
Note: this makes a nasty bland white bread if you don’t dip it in lye. Lye is so basic that it breaks down the starches, exposing the sugars for browning and changing the texture of the crust greatly.
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