AC emailed me late yesterday afternoon. The subject of line of her message read: “Do you want to make something dangerous with me?”

Her agenda?  Homemade pretzel bread. Sounds harmless, right? Not the recipe AC wanted to use. One of the ingredients was lye. That’s right: Lye. The stuff you buy at hardware stores to unclog drains. But I was intrigued, and the recipe was legit—it was from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s book The Bread Bible—so I agreed.

The dough is easy to make, especially when you have an ingredient scale and a stand mixer like AC. First you whisk together bread flour, whole wheat flour, yeast and the optional malt powder in the mixer bowl, then you toss in the salt and add water until the flour is moistened. (AC substituted rye flour because she didn’t have any whole wheat.)
 

 Her mixer pretty much did all the work. Eventually the dough forms a smooth ball. It’s kind of mesmerizing to watch.

 

After that, you divide the dough into 12 pieces and shape them into little flattened balls and let them sit, covered, for an hour. Then you cover the dough with oiled plastic wrap and let them sit another 30 minutes to rise. THEN you’re supposed to refrigerate the dough for an hour but we skipped this last part. AC is not a strict recipe follower, even when it comes to baking. For someone like me, this is a recipe for disaster. For AC not so much.

When your little football-shaped loaves have risen, you put a baking sheet or stone on the lowest shelf of the oven and a cast-iron skillet or sheet pan on the floor of the oven before preheating it.

This is where the lye comes in. Here are Rose’s exact words: “Make the lye solution. Be very careful when working with lye, as it is extremely caustic and will burn if it comes in direct contact with your skin.” And we were going to eat this stuff?

You just need a teaspoon of lye and your mix it in a nonreactive bowl with boiling water and salt and let the solution cool. It looks very innocuous. AC decided to dip most of the loaves in the lye. We made an egg wash glaze for the others. (At this point I still wasn’t sure I was going to eat the lye-dipped loaves.)

AC used a razor blade (could things get any scarier?!) to slash diagonal lines in the dough and then, with rubber gloves on, she used tongs to dip each of the footballs into the lye solution. I sprinkled each of the dipped loaves with kosher salt.

Then she put the parchment-lined pan on the baking stone and immediately tossed a handful of ice cubes into the bottom of the oven and shut the door. The ice cubes are supposed to go into a pan beneath the baking sheet, but AC refuses to go this route. She says she likes the drama. I do not recommend it. We baked the pretzels until they were beautifully golden brown—at least the lye-dipped pretzels turned a deep brown; the egg washed loaves looked anemic.

Are these beautiful or what? We ate every last one.