Not All Soft Pretzels Are Created Equal
On disappointment.
I was going to a wedding on Long Island when I received a text that provoked jubilation:
“Don’t eat before the wedding.”
We were treated to a veritable smorgaspord after the ceremony—chicken and waffles was the appetizer, if that gives you a sense. The dinner was 4 courses, and what must have been 8 desserts were served on small platters, plus the wedding cake. And at the very end, after many guests had gone home, they served fresh soft pretzels.
Reader, I was full. But I ate one.
Soft pretzels are weirdly hard to find unless you’re in very specific situations, like a being at a stadium, a biergarten, or sometimes at a movie theater. Every time one is available to me, I get the feeling I don’t know how long it’ll be until my next chance to have one. At baseball games I succumb to the craving, feeling satisfied that I took advantage of the opportunity.
However, many soft pretzels are… not good. And, as I’ve come to find out, they’re getting worse.
The hard, stale pretzels sold at midtown carts are overpriced and gross. Once, in a moment of hungry desperation, I bought one from a cart near Rockefeller center. I couldn’t bring myself to eat more than a couple bites. Not even mustard could save the thing—it was ice cold and tasted like sawdust.
In a now-deleted Reddit post, a redditor complained of a “bread slurry” that is now used to make cart pretzels, causing them to barely rise, and have an overly dense, flavorless feel. Another asks, “are there any good pretzel carts in NYC?” to which some comments simply read “no.”
I had this pretzel at the Staten Island Ferryhawks game. It made me ashamed to be a New Yorker.
On the flipside, there was a stretch of time where I started getting a pretzel almost every week at a bar movie night. They had a fantastic pretzel, one I looked forward to all week.
Take a look at the surface texture of these three pretzels. The first is glossy and clean, like a piece of plastic. Your teeth almost squeak as they try to cut through its exoskeleton-like shell. The second is rough, pimply and, importantly, not golden brown at all—more like a tragic beige.
The third is browned to perfection, and with enough air inside that you could squeeze it to half its thickness with your thumb and index finger. It’s glossy, sure, but the brown layer is so thin that it cracks under your bite with ease. That is the perfect pretzel.
These three pretzels are incredibly different. If tasting them blindfolded, I would never have guessed they were called the same thing. Yet, if you are lucky enough to encounter something called a pretzel, you are more likely to find a disappointing doppelganger of the snack than something you might enjoy.
The earth-shattering disappointment I felt at the Ferryhawks game led me to wonder why I had to accept these odds. How hard could it be to make like 20 of these things at home? On a quest to find out how pretzels were made, while even less interesting things were happening on the baseball field, I found out the thing that makes pretzels taste so good is poison.
Lye, a drain cleaner and caustic substance that burns human skin, happens to be amazing at browning dough, giving its surface a classic pretzel-y taste.
If I wanted to make a good pretzel, I would have to buy safety goggles, latex gloves, and a special glass container for the solution. Lye, while being dangerous for the skin, is also dangerous for the respiratory system. The pretzel-dipping solution must be kept in a well-ventilated area, and all things that touch it should be washed immediately with cold water. The set-up would have to be flawless.
Interlude: The LGA Cupcake
When I was at the airport going to Ireland, I treated myself to a cupcake before the long plane ride. What I got was a devastatingly dry, crusty muffin that looked and tasted like eating pumpernickel with a stuffed nose. On top was a 3 inch layer of “frosting” that must have been a combination of vegetable shortening and a teaspoon of powdered confectioner’s sugar. It was another crushing failure of a snack that made me question the business owner’s wellbeing.
If you or anyone you know has eaten a “cupcake” at LaGuardia, seek help immediately, call poison control, and contact your local represenatives. Let’s turn this righteous anger into action.
In a way, I was relieved to find out that making pretzels is actually very difficult. If it were easy, it would be even harder to understand how the bar for pretzels has gotten so low.
I spent weeks deciding what brand of lye crystals to buy, what type of gloves wouldn’t melt, and what sort of glass container would be the least likely to crack and spill poison all over my apartment. But I was certain I would be making pretzels. Everybody can be disappointing, but not me. I have to be better, because if I can’t be, then maybe being better isn’t possible. And then what?
This pretzel quest was happening while I was amidst a deep identity crisis. My fellowship was in full swing, and I was producing monthly reported series for work—stories from both were being torn to shreds by editors every step of the way. I had never gotten such a frank assessment of my own work before, nor was I ever expected to improve beyond my baseline. It felt like slamming my head into a brick wall, waiting for the wall to break before my skull did.
In the way that we all do before we learn, I was disappointing myself. Why set my sights on publishing an entire series? Why pitch impossibly ambitious topics for a very well respected publicaton, only read by other writers? Why use lye, when you can use a baking soda solution instead and it’ll only produce a slightly worse version of the pretzel? Maybe because doing something less interesting sounds dumb. Maybe I want to believe I’m different. Maybe my incredible tolerance for eating shit finally caught up to me. But somehow, I believe that if I can make a good pretzel, I can prove to the world that there should be more of them.
The morning before making pretzels, I walked 20 minutes to Home Depot to select my goggles and gloves. Then, I went to Food Baazar to pick the best-looking pyrex dish. Next, I hand-kneaded the dough, because I don’t have a dough hook.
I waited for the dough to rise, folded them, let the pretzels sit in the fridge overnight, and finally dipped them in lye for 30 seconds on each side. I cleaned everything up several times, and kept the cat out of the room. It was somewhat anti-climatic. But when I took the perfectly-shaped pretzels out of the oven, they were delicious. Warm, soft, chewy, and salty, I ate three of them immediately. Nic ate the other two.
The next day, we had friends over, and I gave them our last pretzel. I could tell from their expressions that it had gotten a bit stale.
“It’s good,” they said, uncertainly. I almost grabbed it out of their hands to try it myself. They were right. What I had tasted the night before had morphed into something denser and less precious. Of course, there was enough flour for another batch.
So inspiring! I’m going to get me a bottle of lye and splatter it all over EVERYTHING!!!
Wtf I thought they were really good pretzels 🥺