I learned how to make pretzels from the Great British Baking Show, and that was something I had never tried because it seemed like it’d be too complicated and I saw all you do is you mix up the dough and roll it out and make it into the shape of pretzels, which is not as easy as you might think. It took me a few tries to figure out how to do a pretzel shape and then the secret of a pretzel — how you get that interesting texture of the crust is that you have boiling water and — with soda in it and so I have my boiling water. Here comes another disaster. I had my boiling water and I put the soda in and it exploded over the sides of the pan and I had soda water everywhere on my stove and it even got down between the windows on the glass on the front of the oven. And so that was kind of a disaster to start with but then I started over with my boiling water and that time, I put the soda in before it got to boil too much, and it didn’t have any problems.
But anyway, you take your already formed, raw dough pretzels and you lower ‘em into this boiling soda water just for like 30 seconds and then you take it out and you put it on your baking sheet sprinkle it with salt and then you put it in the oven. And that –the — apparently the water in the soda is what gives a pretzel that nice sheen — that nice brown sheen on it.