A little closer to perfection

perfect packets of low stress

I deal with stress through baking.  The first two weeks of school and some other large decisions that had to be made this weekend managed to peek my stress more than is probably healthy.  Side tangent: I’m in this class and this professor gave us this whole lecture on living high functioning and low stress.  She calls her quizzes rewards and does yoga during our break.  I wish I could be her.  And I am attempting to live low stress, but just when I think my life is starting to mellow, Matt’s life has to go and get stressful.  Basically I suck at low stress high functioning.  The End.

I have been debating what I would make today, knowing I would have some free time i.e. time I should be doing homework.  Then I read the article about baked baking soda in the New York Times.  If you missed my love of The New York Times, please read this post.  When I saw the article on baking soda, I could almost taste soft pretzels.  Now as you might recall from the last time I made soft pretzels (here’s the post if you don’t recall) I have a very special friend who I make soft pretzels with.  This very special friend deserted me for beautiful sunny California – I don’t blame her in the least – but the whole thing puts a damper on my pretzel urges.

I don’t ever want to make pretzels without my pretzel buddy, but today I just needed to feel like everything was going to be Ok and home was close by and the only thing that could manage both of those things was pretzels.  I pulled out baking soda and spread a cup of it on a aluminum lined sheet pan and threw it in the oven at 275 F for 1 hour.  I was a little worried some strange chemical was going to be created from baking the baking soda, but nothing happened and I don’t think I lost any brain cells in the process.  I used this recipe for the pretzels and used Matt’s bread machine to do all of the work.

If you have a bread machine sitting around, please dust it off.  Turn it on basic loaf and let the dough go through the kneading and the resting and the kneading and a little of the resting.  The dough turns out  so beautiful and smooth.  Of course if you don’t have a bread machine you could just kneed the dough by hand, but for the record bread machines should not collect dust.  I am not a fan of actually letting the bread go from start to finish, but the machine is a great way to start any bread.

After the dough was ready I broke it into 24 pieces and rolled them into snakes and wrapped them into pretzels.  I then poured the baked baking soda into 2 cups of water and dipped each pretzel into the solution before putting it on the sheet pan.  I egg washed the pretzels, sprinkled half with salt and half with cinnamon sugar and baked them at 400 F for 10 minutes. During the baking process Matt’s fire alarm kept going off.  I guess the hot oven was too much for it.  So for the 20 minutes that the two batches were baking I ran from the oven to the fire alarm with a pillow to cover the fire alarm.  During the process I started talking to the fire alarm.

“Please, I just need to bake the pretzels.  I’m not burning the apartment down I swear.  Just please be quiet.”

If you don’t speak to inanimate objects, then you can call me crazy all you want.  Anyway the pretzels finished up, the fire alarm stopped talking back to me, and the pretzels were amazing.  I don’t really know how to relate this to you without giving you a pretzel to try, but they tasted like the lye dipped pretzels that I just love so much.  The crust was soft yet a little chewy with an amazing tanginess from the baking soda.  Please don’t take my word for it and try the whole process for yourself.

Baking baking soda seems a little strange.  I don’t know much about chemicals so it sort of freaked me out a little.  But it was so worth it and not a terrible start to the baking process since you just have to stick it in the oven and let it go.

If only everything could turn out so wonderfully perfect.  But I guess that’s why baking exists.  Flour, water, yeast, sugar, and salt make bread.  Get the formula right and it will work the same every time.  Now that’s what I call low stress high functioning.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily