With great power . . . comes great gut-ache

Ben Parker, Peter Parker's (Spider-Man) uncle famously said that "with great power comes great responsibility." Last week I learned this lesson firsthand.

After two years of shopping at safeway, buying gas at Shell, and eating almost exclusively at Boston Pizza, my wife and I saved up enough air miles to buy ourselves a standup mixer. Oh the things I could now make, the list was surely nearly infinite. But first, before anything else, I was determined to make pretzels.

I should have been born in Philadelphia (the pretzel capitol of the US), because I love pretzels. Not those hard desiccated little things you get on airplanes mind you, no, the big, warm and soft golden "twists of bread" pretzels, which thus far have only found at carnivals and hockey games was what I was going for.

The process was surprisingly complex. First you make a dough, which needs to be kneaded for 10 minutes in a standup mixer (hence the need for the air miles), then the portioning, followed by rolling and shaping. Now at this point, logic would suggest that the proto-pretzels just need to be baked, but oh no, first thing required is a bath in a boiling bath of basic water.

Now I don't mean "basic" as in H2O, no I mean basic in the scientific sense, or "water which has an imbalance of hydroxyl groups to hydrogen atoms." To achive this I disolved 2/3 of a cup of baking soda in 10 cups of water, to obtain the desired pH of 8 or 9. Placing the pretzels in this solution has two effects. First it gelatinizes some of the starches on the outside of the pretzel, and second, it slightly cooks the outside. The former helps the baked-good brown while the latter gives the pretzel a chewy crust.

Following the bath, a quick brushing with egg-wash and a liberal salting is all they require before they go into an oven for 12 or so minutes.

When you open the oven door precisely one half of a Daily Show later, what greets you are beautifully brown twists of dough, begging to be eaten.

And eat them I did, with mustard.

Unfortunately I now know why pretzels are only sold at carnivals; in quantities of three or more, pretzels assault the lower GI tract like a SWAT team entering a building. Couple this to the fact that I'm probably slightly allergic to gluten (a protein found in wheat flour, which gives bread it's characteristic elasticity) and I was horribly ill.

Unfortunately my stomach now associates all pretzels with gut wrenching spasms, and I can't even enjoy the $5.00 pretzels sold at hockey games. But I have learned my lesson, with great power comes great responsibility, and I'm obviously not responcible enough to posess the power to make my own pretzels.