It can be used for Laugenbrotchen, bagels, curing olives at home, Asian noodles, all kinds of stuff!!!

After preparing your dough and shaping your pretzels-

(Note on pretzel shape, middle should be larger, ends tapered. When folded the dough should be divided into thirds. Never let ends get thin enough so they get dry and hard. Some German pretzel bakers will put a slash along the “belly” of the pretzel (fat part in middle) before baking.

Dissolve 1 ounce of Sodium Hydroxide in 1 quart of water. (Add lye to water, not water to lye.)
(There is no need to heat the solution. The lye does all the work.)

Put pretzels in lye bath for 30 seconds, then lay out on your parchment paper on your baking sheet and sprinkle with salt. (No egg wash or any other silliness required. The dough surface will be quite sticky after the bath.)

There is no substitute for lye as the lye pushes the PH of the solution to 13 or 14 and makes the Maillard Reaction fast enough to get that perfect crust.

It is impossible to make a strong enough solution with baking soda. Don’t believe me? Make a paste that is almost 100% baking soda and see if it is corrosive.

Although a 3 or 4 % solution of Lye is corrosive, it’s also not that dangerous to work with. Simple precautions are plenty: Wear safety glasses, immediately clean anywhere it goes with lots of water. You can use vinegar to neutralize it. Use (Un)Common sense and you’ll be fine.

If you get it on you you have plenty of time to go to the sink and wash it off, your arm or hands won’t burst into flames.

Use plastic, stainless steel or glass utensils/bowls — NO ALUMINUM.

Food grade lye is easily obtainable on Ebay or elsewhere. Sometimes you can get it from the hardware store in the drain cleaner section, but if you do this you must make sure it is marked 100% Lye. Drano and many other drain openers mix the lye with different metals. You only want 100% lye.

If you order from these guys http://myworld.ebay.com/essentialdepot/ on Ebay you get 2 pounds of food grade lye for $15 total. This is enough to last a lifetime as you can save the lye solution (use plastic bottle so it won’t break, tightly closed, well labeled and stored properly like other household chemicals) and use it for quite a few batches.

Authentic pretzels CAN NOT BE MADE WITHOUT LYE!!!

There are no exceptions to this rule. The baking soda varieties are a poor fake of the real thing.
They may look kinda like pretzels but that’s about it.

I must re-iterate that any claims of a baking soda pretzel being “authentic” are bunk as baking soda CAN NOT provide the proper PH for the chemical reaction, period.

If you really like them and are going to spend the time, do it right.

If you don’t want to do it right you might as well just buy them in the store, some frozen store bought varieties will be better than home made as they will have been lye dipped.

If you may have noticed I am passionate about authentic pretzels and take no prisoners ;-)
I was taught how to make pretzels by a German pretzel baker in Zweibruecken DE

Baking soda should NEVER be anywhere near a pretzel!

Making your own pretzels isn’t about compromising taste.

LYE at 3% concentration is not particularly dangerous.
People pour 100% lye crystals down their kitchen drain to unclog pipes and never think anything about it. No particular caution.

Now tell them to use a 3% concentration to dip bagels or pretzels and the go all freaky.