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The dudes of Dude Food are cooking with lye
Brad Spence and Jeff Michaud show off the secret to great homemade pretzels, and we try to answer any lingering questions you may have about the secret ingredient.
The dudes of Dude Food are cooking with lye
Jeff Michaud and Brad Spence’s second installment of Dude Food has the pair making soft pretzel nuggets and a dip made with asiago, cream cheese, and beer. Between things getting dunked in hot beer cheese, seeing the chefs decked out in end-of-the-world level safety gear, an only-way-it-should-be recipe by weight, and the simple fact that the very sight of soft pretzels has an instant iron grip on some of us Philadelphians, well… there’s not much here not to like.
Speaking of lye—the stuff isn’t really that scary as long as you’re cautious, but it’s also not something you can just pick up at any corner store. So if you’d like to try your hand at pretzels but are unsure about procuring and using lye just yet, here are a couple of tips we’ve learned along the way as baking hobbyists.
Plenty of people use the simple baking soda sub mentioned in the video, but in truth, it’s lacking if you're after true pretzels. However, there is middle ground between plain old baking soda and a special-order 5-pound tub of food-grade lye. Look in Asian markets for lye water, which is used in noodle-making amongst other things, but may be more dilute than a lye solution you mix up yourself. Or take some advice from Harold McGee and just bake your baking soda to intensify it. Baking soda is about as cheap and prevalent as it gets, and the baking process is simple. When you see the difference the alkaline dunk makes, you can decide if you’ll make enough pretzels to want to commit to a lye order.
Caveats: lye water and baked soda, even if not as strong as straight-up lye, are strong bases and should be handled with care. Don’t let kids or pets near, wear gloves, etc. If you do want to pick up some lye, it's pretty inexpensive and readily available on Amazon if you can't find it close to home (a 2 lb. container goes a long way). Delicious, hot, homemade pretzels will more than make up for the trouble.
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