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food: What to eat. What not to eat.

Twisted DesireAn eater's field guide to pretzels.

By Sara Dickerman
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2007, at 12:43 PM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

It is Oktoberfest in Munich right now—a celebration of beer, bratwurst, and impossibly huge crowds. As I approach my third trimester of pregnancy, none of those things is particularly good for me to indulge in, but one other Oktoberfest treat presents no qualms: my favorite salty snack, pretzels. While I rarely pass a day without a pretzel, I'm surprised by how little respect pretzels get in the snack-food world, particularly here on the West Coast. They are generally viewed as innocuous—an acceptable backup snack—but they're no competition for whiz-pow-bang-flavor-dusted potato and tortilla chips. (This is echoed in sales statistics, where potato chips grab about 38 percent, and tortilla chips 26 percent, of the salty-snack market. Pretzels hover closer to 7.5 percent to 8 percent.)

But it is the very lack of flash that draws me to the pretzel. Pretzels do not need the lush fattiness of chips or cheese puffs. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the pretzel as a snack "used, esp. by Germans as a relish with beer," and it is perhaps this complementary quality that keeps pretzels below the radar.

Because of their link to beer and harvest-time drinking, I like to think of pretzels as one of those pagan holdovers like mistletoe, but, at least in legend, their invention is decidedly Christian. An Italian monk, in the year 610, is said to have twisted a rope of dough into the classic form—the twist itself representing arms folded in prayer, and the three holes a nod to the Holy trinity. Some claim pretzel comes from the Latin pretiola, which means "little rewards," as the crunchy knots were purportedly given to children as prizes for piety. Other etymologies look back to the Medieval Latin term bracellus, meaning "bracelet."

Strip away their salt, and pretzels, both soft and hard, share their distinctively smooth crust with a decidedly un-Christian—and also glorious—food, bagels. While bagels usually take a bath in warm water before baking to obtain that signature sheen, the secret to a pretzel's telltale crust is traditionally the powerful base lye. According to Harold McGee's essential reference On Food and Cooking, a short dip or shower in a dilute solution of lye before baking converts some of the pretzel's outer starches into an alkaline gel, which browns especially quickly and creates the pretzel's distinctive sheeny surface. (Soda ash or baking soda is often used for alkalinity in place of lye these days.) For fun diagrams, click here.

Soft pretzels were probably the first pretzels, since they require a single short spell in the oven. (Hard pretzels, which are dried out in a lower temperature cycle, were probably developed to keep pretzels fresh for storage.) I was pleased this summer while traveling through German-speaking Switzerland to realize that pretzels are a perfectly acceptable breakfast there—soft-pretzel stands grace every public square, and I even had a sandwich of a pretzel roll, cut in half, smeared with butter and mustard and layered with salami. Still, as much as I relish the mahogany sheen of a well-crafted soft pretzel, I am too often disappointed by them. I can't count the number of times I've visited New York and giddily bought a street-side pretzel, only to experience the tired tug of stale dough.

Strong, hardy—the hard pretzel is less delicate than its soft sibling, and for me, it is the purest expression of pretzel soul. In this country, hard pretzels are the specialty of southern Pennsylvania, that is, Pennsylvania Dutch country, where Germans settled, bringing their bread-making traditions with them. The first pretzel business was established by bread baker Julius Sturgis in 1861 in Lititz, Pa. (he reputedly got the recipe from a tramp to whom he had offered his hospitality), and Pennsylvania still has an astounding hold on pretzel production today.