Pretzels

Pretzels are started with a careless shaggy dough prepared in advance. There is little point to kneading a dough that eventually will be tortured as a pretzel. The shaggy dough is left to fend for itself overnight, the whole next day, and the next night. So that's like, what, thirty-six hours. The extended proofing period alters the dough significantly, and ah pity da fool who hastens the production of pretzels. Check out this dough comet. 

This is what is intended by the term careless shaggy dough. It is not brought together completely. It is not kneaded. There is no clean oiled bowl transfer as with ordinary bread dough. This dough will stick to the bowl. It is mixed, yes, but only just barely.

The dough is provided salt to flavor the entire batch but salt will retard the development of the yeast, especially the early development, and we do want that development to go slowly this time. A fraction of the usual amount of yeast is provided to ensure it does not begin with the usual bang but rather by slow and tenuous cautious yeast-budding. 

*  1 + 1/2 cup warm water

*  3 cups unsifted flour

*  1 level teaspoon sea salt

*  1/6 teaspoon dry active yeast

This is the risen and developed fully-proofed dough thirty-six hours later: 

Turned out onto a floured work surface. You can see the dough is too wet. The wet dough will pick up additional flour from the work surface so the amount of flour spread across the work surface is adjusted continuously. 

front ↑  side ↓

front ↑  side ↓

Okay, a person might be thinking, "Gee, that was shame to deflate those bubbles and make it start over making new bubbles." 

It took a day and a half for the yeast to build up to an ordinary dose of yeast and then to continue full blast after that. I notice by looking at the rim of the risen dough (sponge, technically)  around the bowl that the yeast maxed out earlier and fell back. At that point the yeast activity began slowing down. It began shutting down. Some yeast even went into full survivalist mode.

The dough is deflated when turned onto the table and the yeast inside is suddenly  slammed into propinquity with their corresponding diploid types there to combine into the more robust haploid types which themselves bud copies of their material. Redistributed. Reawakened by the shock and the shake and the stretch and by the immediate availability of compressed food the yeast steps up its cloning activity, no longer surrounded by pockets of its own waste air. Both reproductive forms of passing the same genetic material are reactivated by this sudden redistribution. The dough veritably explodes inside with cellular activity. Back on our level of existence we see the result of that cellular activity, the visible expansion of the outer skin stretched by the inflation of internal bubbles, the yeast's digestive gas, deal with it. 

All that cellular activity over time is one form of kneading. You can see in the picture of wet dough the reticulation looks like edges of remnant bubbles and what appears to be threads, probably wet coated gluten threads. 

Stretching the dough is another form of kneading, as was already done to get this far by the folding shown above, and then to continue to stretch, and really stretch as shown below. 

front ↑  side ↓

  

2% lye solution, but what is that? I used two tablespoons for a large bowl of water. It was probably way under 2% but it was enough to change the water to appear to be heavier than without it. Thicker. The pretzel dough shaped into the praying hands configuration is dipped into the clear lye solution then lifted out with a slotted spatula or with a wire spider. 

The lye dipping treatment gelates the surface starch of the pretzel. In the oven, the starch gel hardens and shines. Browning-reaction pigments and flavor compounds accumulate rapidly. The lye reacts with carbon dioxide in the oven to form a harmless edible carbonate.