The taps are now open!

Posted at 9:25 pm by Patrick under Beer Culture, Beer Photos, Home Brewing

An IPA and best bitter are now on tap!

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Pretzel-mania

Posted at 5:15 pm by Patrick under Beer Culture, Food Pairings, Home Brewing

Since Andrea and I are having a few folks over tonight, I thought it might be fun to have some homemade pretzels with our beers. I found a recipe in Zymurgy Magazine for soft pretzels, and got my bake on.

The most interesting thing about the recipe is the requisite dipping of the proofed pretzel shapes into a caustic bath. Traditionally, lye is used for this bath, but finding food-grade lye can be hard to find. I used baking soda instead, and it came out really well.

Ideally, they are best served warm form the oven, but they also microwave well if done gently (30% power for 20 second bursts).

Having spent the better part of the afternoon rolling out, bathing and baking 4 dozen pretzels, I have a little better appreciation for artisanal baking. But it did get me thinking about how small bakers in the US toil in obscurity. In Europe, there are bakeries on almost every corner. Everything is priced so anyone can afford it. Fresh baked goods are ingrained in the culture. It’s essential for life. What’s more, people know their neighborhood bakers. The unsung work of working dough at 3am so fresh loaves are ready at 6am is done with pride.

Here is the US, we rarely know who bakes our bread. In our Wal-Martized, “everything under one massive roof” society, mega-marts now have streamlined production bakeries in the store for optimized bread ouput. Even with that, the advent of “no-carb” causes what is baked to be engineered to make the Nutrition Facts panel look good, rather than have some tooth or taste to it. Ugh.

I don’t think I’ll be buying pretzels from the House that Sam Built anytime soon.

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