We clean with baking soda, we cook with baking soda, and we bake with baking soda. But baking baking soda? That seems almost counterintuitive.
But if you love the flavor of old-fashioned pretzels and find yourself without (or hesitant to use) lye, which is corrosive and somewhat frightening, bake baking soda you should!
By spreading baking soda out on an aluminum-lined baking sheet and putting it in a 250° F oven for one hour, you'll turn a weak alkali into a stronger one—or, as Harold McGee put it in his 2010 New York Times article outlining the tip, you'll get a "a more muscular and versatile alkali" that's closer in chemical make-up and effect to its hulky cousin, lye (but without as much scariness).
All of this means that, by using baked baking soda, you can get pretzels that are more similar in flavor, color, and chew to the kind that would require you to wear goggles and plastic gloves. (Yes you can make pretzels with straight-from-the-carton baking soda, but McGee says these imposters are actually more like twisted breadsticks. McGee also points out that you should be careful with baked baking soda, too—don't spread it over your forearms.)
To test the tip, I baked Erin McDowell's pretzels using baked baking soda instead of lye. I boiled 10 cups of water with 2/3 cup of baked baking soda, per Alton Brown's ratio, then dipped each proofed pretzel in the bubbling pot, one at a time, for about 30 seconds each. After an egg wash and a salt sprinkle, they were baked as usual.
While my pretzels made with the super-charged baking soda didn't come out quite as dark as Erin's lye-dipped pretzels (see the photos below for a comparison), they did have the distinct, slightly bitter taste of a real live pretzel. And I didn't have to order lye from the internet to make them!
You'll wonder what to do with baked baking soda. You can keep it in a sealed container in the pantry (McGee says indefinitely) to make pretzels to your heart's content, and you can also use it in homemade alkaline noodles—which are chewy, yellow-tinged, and often found in a bowl of ramen.
"One also might detect a vague pretzel-like funkiness in the flavor," writes Michael Laiskonis in Lucky Peach. For both the pretzel maker and the noodle maker, Laiskonis continues, "'baked soda' offers a perfect compromise between weak baking soda and hazardous sodium hydroxide, or lye."
Safety and taste? That's a compromise we can get behind.
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Written by: Sarah Jampel
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(Washing soda, incidentally, shines as a deodorizer of fabric. I can't stand the smell of Tide™, which is a problem if you buy clothes on eBay, it seemingly being the law that all such are saturated in the stuff, though there are certainly worse ways for used clothes to smell. I used to have to wash them five or six times to get that smell out, but one or two washes with washing soda will do; I found this tip on someone's dirty cloth diaper coping message board.)
A glass pan would work too—the reaction at hand (sodium bicarbonate->sodium carbonate + carbon dioxide + water) doesn't involve anything other than the baking soda itself.
A metal cookie sheet (aluminum or otherwise) would simply be faster than a glass pan at heating up the baking soda, given the thermal characteristics of glass vs those metals.
If you want to do some research, all you have to do is use Google. The most common source of aluminium in these plaques is due to contamination in lab environments anyway.
I have been a chef for 13 years and went to culinary school, to explain the care I used preparing my recipes. Any help is appreciated!
Puzzling! I love a good culinary mystery, and ammonia-like results from baked baking soda... well, the reaction doesn't produce any ammonia-like compounds. (I'm assuming you're using fresh sodium bicarbonate, and that there's no contamination, given your culinary expertise.)
I'd be curious what you would taste if you bought sodium carbonate directly. If you're wanting to experiment, search online for "sodium carbonate" or "washing soda" (make sure it's food grade) -- and try using that instead. Do you get the same ammonia-like hit?
I admit I've forgotten most of the organic chemistry that I took in college, so I can't go into a more intense description of what's happening, but aluminum isn't part of the reaction and won't end up in your "Baked Soda"
The aluminum isn't going to interact with the sodium bicarbonate. When heated, bicarbonate gives off a hydrogen ion that another bicarbonate picks up (ah, amphoteric compounds...), kicking off a carbon dioxide and water molecule in the process.
In Alton's pretzel episode, he said that baking soda didn't work well enough on its own, so he used the egg wash to make up the difference. I've been wondering if baked baking soda works so much better than unbaked that the egg wash isn't necessary. Any chance you tried it without the eggs?
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