I just had to pull the cream cheese train off to the side tracks for a moment to extoll the virtues of a truly amazing ingredient: xanthan gum. Oh sure, people demonize it, but usually without bothering to find out what it really is or does. The fact that it sounds "science-y" is enough to elicit derision or even contempt from a certain stripe of organic bandwagoneer. Yes, there is the very rare individual that's allergic to it. But people are allergic to all kinds of things, are they not?

Xanthan gum was invented in the heyday of corn sugar fermentation research, the 1960's. At the time, folks in the USDA labs were looking for a thickener that was more versatile and efficient than corn starch and easier to produce than guar gum. One day, they allowed a culture of a bacterium by the name of Xanthomonas campestris to feed on a solution of corn-derived glucose. What resulted was a slimy, colorless substance that turned out to be one of the most broadly useful food ingredients currently known to man. For it turns out that in the process of digesting the glucose, the bacteria rearranged the individual sugars into longer-chain sugars (polysaccharides) with truly amazing properties.

What are those properties? For one, thickening. Applied in proportions of as little as a quarter percent, xanthan gum can increase the viscosity of a fluid that pours like water into one that pours like motor oil, making it highly useful for things like salad dressings. But that's not all it can do. It can stop the formation of ice crystals in ice creams, replace the fatty mouthfeel in low-fat dairy products, and act as a stand-in for gluten in gluten-free baked goods.

But for me the most amazing property of xanthan gum is its pseudoplasticity, which is to say its ability to take on different consistencies according to how much force is applied to it. This phenomenon — also called shear thinning — is most commonly witnessed in ketchup bottles, whereas the ketchup is thick when it's sitting still, thins out when its shaken and poured, then thickens again when it comes to rest. Of course liquids like sauces aren't the only applications for this sort of behavior. Shear forces are also applied in the course of chewing. That makes xanthan gum highyl desirable in a thing like a cheesecake, which you want to hold its shape on the plate and on the fork, but which you want to lose thickness rapidly once it's in the mouth.

As an extra-geeky side note, I should add that shear thinning is frequently confused with thixotropy, which is a similar phenomenon, but which takes place over a lengthier period of time. Shear thinning happens fast, almost instantaneously. Just so we're clear on that. ;)

Reader Mike writes in with this interesting tidbit on where the word "pretzel" may have come from:

When I lived in Germany, there was a little bakery at the bottom of the hill that made fresh pretzels every day - and this being the South, they were lye pretzels. Regarding the origin of the term, there is a Swabian belief that it derives from the local variant word for bread, coupled with the dialectical diminutive so beloved by Southern Germans - meaning "little bread". Brädsl and similar variants abound. As to the truth of it, I can't say, but it *feels* more like the truth than the bracelet explanation, rightly or wrongly.

I may not be the world's biggest cream cheese fan, but I know a top-quality product when I see one, and Philadelphia cream cheese is it (no, they're not paying me to say that). Its composition is similar to several of the "natural" cream cheese products on the market except for a few very important additions: xanthan and/or guar and/or carob gum. These harmless additives help make cream cheese what it is, and by extension, cheesecake what it is. All three are natural compounds, though truth be told, while guar and carob gums are naturally-occurring (found inside the seed coats of beans), xanthan gum is fermented from corn starch (don't tell Michael Pollan, OK?).

So what do they do? Mostly they're there to keep the cream cheese thick, but also to keep it from separating...to keep the fat from congealing into large masses (the job of an emulsifier) and to keep the solids in the cheese from sinking or floating to the top (the job of a stabilizer). Both functions are important in the ingredient as well as in the finished product, helping to keep the texture smooth and creamy.

The good news for the European home baking underground, and other Joe Pastry readers around the world, is that Philadelphia Cream Cheese (a Kraft product) can be found pretty much everywhere on Earth.

Nope. True, more than a few cheesecake recipes call for at least a little flour or corn starch. The reason for this is twofold. First, to absorb moisture. I've mentioned that cream cheese is 45% fat. The other 55% is mostly water. Add in a fair amount of cream or sour cream (which also have quite a bit of water) and you can get a small amount of weeping. The starch helps bind this water up before it can collect and run out of the cake. This recipe has enough egg in it that weeping won't be a problem. For a still more delicate cheesecake you can take out one of the eggs, though there will be a little puddling. Just dab it up with a paper towel.

But where was I? Oh, right: the second reason for starch. The second reason to add starch to a cheesecake is as an insurance policy against curdling or cracking. Mixed into a custard — and yes, cheesecake is a custard — starch molecules get between protein molecules and prevent them from bunching up (the action that creates curds, squeezes out moisture and causes separation). The trouble is that those same starch molecules result in a — surprise, surprise — starchy, slightly chalky taste and texture. For my money, the best insurance against cracking and curdling is a water bath.

For more on the science of custards check out this series of posts right here.

A true New York-style cheesecake has no crust. Which is not to say you can't add one if you like, but let's worry about that a little later on. This recipe is dense and creamy, just like a New York cheesecake is supposed to be. Note that the reason for the creaminess is not an abundance of cream cheese, but an abundance of sour cream, which serves not only to cut the fat content way down, but to introduce a very pleasant tang. I make this cake in a nine-inch springform pan, however if you're the type of person that prefers your cheesecake very tall, you can use an eight.

18 ounces cream cheese
8 ounces sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 eggs
1 lb. 8 ounces sour cream (you can also use heavy cream, or any combination of the two)

Bring all ingredients to room temperature before you start. Set your oven to preheat at 350 while you line your pan with parchment paper (for more on that, see the post How to Prepare a Cake Pan for Baking under the Techniques menu). You'll also need to have the elements of a water bath nearby: a shallow pan big enough to hold the cake pan, plus a tea kettle or pan of water set over heat. You'll also need some tin foil to create a "boat" for the cake pan.

Now then, for the batter. In the bowl of a mixer fitted with a paddle, combine the cream cheese, sugar and salt and beat on medium speed for about four minutes until the mixture is light and creamy, scraping the bowl once or twice to make sure everything is combined. Beat in the vanilla, then, one at a time, beat in the eggs (again, don't forget to scrape the bowl). Once you're satisfied that everything is homogenous, turn the mixer down to medium-low and start adding the sour cream by scoops. Scrape and stir until all is combined.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pan. Set the pan on cris-crossed sheets of tin foil and bring up the edges to form a "boat" that will prevent water from seeping in. Put the cake pan into the larger baking pan and place it on a center rack in the oven. Slide the oven rack with the pan out part way, and carefully pour in enough simmering water to come about half way up the sides of the cake pan. Close the oven door and bake for 45 minutes. Turn off the oven and — without opening the oven door — let the cheesecake bake for one more hour as the oven cools. Take the cheesecake out of the oven (it should be slightly jiggly but not at all soupy in the center), cool it on a rack for another hour, then cover it tightly with plastic wrap and put it into the refrigerator overnight.

I don't really like cream cheese. Oh I don't mind it, but I don't just love it like some people do. I don't especially like its plastic, putty-like texture. I'm not especially wild about its mildly-gamey-but-otherwise-bland, almost watery, flavor. I also don't particularly enjoy the fact that it's rich, rich, rich — about 45% fat.

But Joe, you love butter, and butter has almost twice the fat.

Very true, however I'd like you to meditate for a moment on the pure, golden glory that is butter and tell me if cream cheese even exists in the same universe, satisfaction-wise. I'll also add in my defense that people don't make cakes that are composed of up to 70% butter. Sure, if someone ever did I'd nominate them for the Nobel prize, but that's isn't the point. Cream cheese, for me, is a poor transaction.

Which is not to say that I don't like it as an ingredient. I like a smear of it on a bagel. I like it in a Danish. I appreciate what it can do for the texture of a cookie or a pie crust. I can even live with it in a frosting, provided the frosting is on a carrot cake. Much beyond that though, and cream cheese is sorely trying my patience.

Not everybody feels like that. More than a few cheesecakes out there are little more than hunks of cream cheese sweetened with sugar and lightened (slightly) with egg, so some of the recipe writers say, in order to remove the encumberances to the enjoyment of "pure unadulterated cream cheese." I simply don't get that. Which is why I usually run in the other direction, toward recipes that minimize the cream cheese in favor of heavy cream or sour cream.

But Joe, come on, how rich are cream and sour cream?

Not that rich by comparison. The heaviest of (American) heavy creams weigh in at 36% fat. Sour creams: 16% fat. And either one bring a lot more in terms of subtlety of flavor to the eating experience. They also make the finished cheesecake creamier on the palate and lighter on the fork. Not so light that the cake ceases to be "New York-style", just lighter than the usual slabs of modeling clay that are served at chain restaurants.

I don't blame you if you don't believe me. Having written all this, I confess I'm having a minor crisis of confidence myself. But having thrown the gauntlet down, I'd better deliver.

Last week, an urgent communiqué was received from the European home baker's underground via the Joe Pastry international signal station at Nova Scotia. It read:

CHEESECAKE RECIPE NEEDED IMMEDIATELY. STOP. MUST BE NEW YORK-STYLE. STOP. NOT TOO HEAVY. STOP. NONE OF THAT GUMMY TEXTURE OR CHALKY DRIED-OUT EDGES NONSENSE. STOP. AWAITING REPLY. STOP. OVER.

I've got a request list here as long as my right arm waiting for attention, but what to do? There are brothers and sisters-at-arms in need. Their call cannot go unheeded.

Since I started pretzels over a week ago, I've been inundated with myths I'd never heard of before. There's the one about the baker's apprentice who burned some bread "braids" while his master was out on morning deliveries. There's the one about how the Swiss gave them as gifts at wedding ceremonies, thus giving birth to the idiom "tying the knot." Then the one about superstitious central Europeans, who tugged on them like wishbones in hopes of receiving divine grace. And then there's the possible connection between the pretzel and Jewish "pletzel" bread, which is so fraught with complexity that it makes my tiny brain hurt.

Someone could surely write a book on this subject, but it won't be me, because I've had my fill of pretzels for the time being. Thanks to everyone who contributed their time and energy to this very stimulating discussion. Special thanks go out to Chef Mike Crabb, an early lye bath cheerleader, and a terrific help with the recipe. Now...on to the next project!

Is this a Joe-style afternoon snack or what? Home made pretzels are another one of those things that will amaze you for their simplicity and make you wonder if you can ever be happy with the store-bought variety again. As you already know from the recipe below, my version calls for a stater. You want it well fed and rarin' to go, which is to say, it needs to be able to reach this bubbly active stage within four hours of a feeding (at room temperature):

Starter in hand, you're good to go. Combine your stater, flour, malt syrup, water and salt in the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook...

...and knead for 6-8 minutes until the dough comes together. It should be firm but largely smooth.

Cut it into 3-ounces pieces (for soft pretzels), 1-to-1 1/2 ounce pieces for hard ones. Spritz your board with a little water and roll each piece into a ball. Cover the dough balls with a moist towel and let rise for one hour.

Now you're ready to shape. Pat each ball into a log, like so.

Now prepare to roll each piece into a long snake. Here the proper technique helps. Start with all four fingertips on the top of the dough log.

As you push forward, spread your fingers apart. This will help stretch this very elastic dough.

When the piece is long enough, put both hands to the task. You'll want to roll it out to eighteen or more inches in length.

To shape the pretzel, form the dough into a "u."

Cross the ends.

Cross them again.

Then fold the forked end downward. Done!

Put the shaped pretzels on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper, cover loosely with plastic wrap and refrigerate them overnight or up to two days. The next day, when you're ready to make your pretzels, prepare your lye bath or baking soda poaching solution. If you're using lye, be sure to take the appropriate safety precautions: put on protective eyewear, gloves and a long-sleeve shirt and make sure no children or pets enter the kitchen. Here I'm just using a boiling baking soda solution, so I don't need the gear. Dip or poach your pretzels for about 30 seconds.

Poached pretzels will be slightly plumped.

Put them on a rack and let drip-dry for a minute or so.

Transfer to a greased or oiled sheet pan. If you're not using a lye solution, you'll need to apply your egg wash at this point.

Sprinkle on your kosher salt...

...and you're ready to bake. Do it immediately or the salt will begin to melt. Here actual "pretzel salt" is nice, but kosher works just fine too. Bake on a middle rack in a 400 oven for 10 minutes, rotate the pan, and bake another 7-10 minutes until well browned.

For hard pretzels, bake them at 350 for 45 minutes or more until dark brown and crunchy.

Break out the mustard and beer!

Happy Super Bowl weekend to everyone! Back with more baking shenanigans next week!

Reader Matthew chimes in with this key point:

You're missing one component in your discussion of why people use lye for pretzels. I learned this a few years ago when I compared several of the alternatives you mentioned against the lye-dipped pretzels. Only lye-dipped pretzels really taste like pretzels! It is a difficult flavor to describe, but immediately recognizable as "pretzel." The alternatives lacked that "pretzel" taste, so the use of lye goes beyond appearance and texture, and directly to the heart of the matter--taste!

Well said Matthew. Thanks!

You know we're coming close to reaching the pinnacle of our civilization when even small local doughnuts shops are producing masterpieces like this: the maple bacon doughnut. I was given this artwork this morning and it was all I could do to contain myself long enough to take the picture. Crispy-sweet-salty-tender...oh mama, that's the stuff.

Jim C. of Chez Jim offers this article on the history of pretzels. For those of you who don't (and I know I don't), he offers this helpful summary:

Hoefler says indeed that in old High German, the word meant bracelet and that it was eaten for Lent. He also suggests that it was linked to the cult of the dead - the salt was to chase away demons, the bracelet shape suggested objects put in the tomb (as other pastries suggested braids, pieces of money, etc). Conversely, another writer says that in Alsace pretzels were handed out to celebrate a birth. Another story is that a lord, offended by an insolent subject, said "You will escape the gallows if you give me a biscuit through which I see the sun shine three times." (The association with the Trinity may only be implicit here, but I believe others suggest it more explicitly.)

In Alsace, pretzels are often made with cumin instead of or with salt. In the 19th century, Austrian bakers considered the pretzel a fine pastry just like the kaisersemmel (kaiser roll) or the kipfel (croissant), and so a luxury item. Austria of course also has the salzstangl, essentially a stick-shaped pretzel.

Drill down into it for some very interesting pictures of unusually-shaped pretzels.

UPDATE: My good friend Gerhard counters with this:

Over here it is not considered a fine pastry. It's more like what rural people like farmers eat... hence the connection with beer. Same thing with Kaisersemmerl... the name only refers to the special form of the roll, not to it being a fine pastry. The Kipferl is indeed something of a luxury item... be it a Butterkipferl or a Mürbes Kipferl. The Salzstangerl on the other hand is a stick-shaped roll with very little coarse salt and cumin-seeds on it and has otherwise nothing to do with a Brezel since it's simply baked like a roll.

Having said that, all these items have changed in recent decades as tastes have changed. A Salzstangerl today is loaded with salt and tastes like a totally different thing. A Kaisersemmerl once was a "slow" handmade thing, today it's all machine-made. Also, these rolls once made a cracking sound when you broke them in half. Today they're silent. Very sad.

Here's a good website on Brezel and the history... in german, but maybe Babelfish or another translator works: http://www.brezel-baecker.de/brezelgeschichte

A few football fan readers who don't keep bread starters at home have asked what suggestions I have for them with the Super Bowl fast approaching. The easy answer is to go conventional and just find a likely straight dough pretzel recipe somewhere on the internet (King Arthur Flour has several good ones). However before you go that route I suggest that you go in search of a little starter first. Most medium-to-large towns have boutique bakeries these days, and all but the stingiest are willing to give a cup of starter away to an ambitious home baker. Just feed it according to my suggestions (a 50-50 mix of flour and water by weight) and the recipe will work just fine. If there isn't a boutique bakery near you — but there is a good pizza place — you might inquire there. They may just use a preferment in their dough.

Reader Amber writes:

Joe, you mentioned below that drying and staling weren't the same thing. Could you tell me what exactly the difference is?

I love these kinds of questions. As I said, most people distinguish between so-called "soft" pretzels and hard ones. I don't, since one is simply an aged version of the other. That's what the word "stale" actually means. It's akin to "ripened", a term we modern types only apply to fruit, cheese or wine, but which the ancients (and the not-so-ancients) also applied to bread. They all enjoyed "aged" bread, mostly because they had no alternative.

But what is staling exactly? Most people think of it as the "drying out" of bread, but that ain't the half of it. If it were, fresh bread kept in a tight sheath of plastic wrap would never go stale. I think we've all experimented with double and triple layers of Reynold's Wrap long enough to know what a fool's paradise that is. So what is it with bread that it starts to harden the moment it's removed from the oven? It all has to do with the behavior of starch molecules.

Wheat starch is made up of two basic components, both of them long-chain sugars, also known as carbohydrates: amylose and amylopectin. Both are made up of many many units of glucose, and that makes them similar. Yet in each case those units of glucose are arranged differently, which causes them to behave in different ways. Amylose is built like a stalk of bamboo, with all of its glucose units (up to 1,000 or so) arranged in a straight, parallel chain. Amylopectin, in the other hand, looks more like a shrub, with its glucose units (up to 20,000 of them) going off every which way.

Hundreds or thousands of both make up a typical starch "granule" (or single grain of flour) with the long straight amylose in nice orderly layers (starch crystals) and the amylopectin in big bushy heaps. Add water and heat to that scenario (dough making and baking) and things start to change. The bonds that keep the carbohydrate molecules bunched together weaken, and water molecules start getting in between them. The starch granule swells.

This continues until the finished bread is taken out of the oven, at which point the process starts to reverse itself. The carbohydrate molecules start to reorder themselves. It doesn't happen quickly, but it does happen inexorably. The carbs, especially the amyloses, become re-attracted to one another and begin stacking themselves back up again in neat piles, making hard crystals once again. The water molecules are forced out from between them, and shortly evaporate.

So you see, bread goes stale not just because it's dryer, but because its structure is also harder. If you own a microwave you've no doubt noticed that you can re-gelatinize starch to some extent with a little fast heat. But with much of the water already gone, the effect is fleeting, barely enough time to butter that scone and stuff it into your mouth!

What would any tour of bogus food myths be without at least a stop at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the most baking-intensive conflict in the history of man? Quite poor, methinks. To get a sense for how this one goes, start with the standard story about how the croissant originated there, and merely substitute the pretzel. You'll get the idea.

Reader Jacki writes in with this:

You mention a "chewy" inside. Does this mean you have been talking about soft pretzels this whole time? I thought it was hard pretzels that you had been describing. Could you clarify, and maybe explain the difference between the two?

I certainly can — because historically speaking, they're one and the same thing. Hard pretzels are simply fresh pretzels that have been dried out and/or allowed stale (I make that distinction because there's a difference between dryness and staling). The things we think of as "soft" pretzels are simply bigger versions of standard pretzels, served fresh (or relatively fresh...I'm convinced a lot of the pretzels served off vending carts in New York are days old if not older, and are merely steamed to create the illusion of freshness).

But where was I? Oh yes, hard and soft. Once upon a time, prior to about 100 years ago when fresh bread became all the rage in big cities, most bread was eaten stale. Quite often, rock hard. Though it's hard for us spoiled moderns to understand, bread has historically been less a foodstuff than a strategy for preserving grain, just as cheese preserves milk, sausage preserves meat and wine preserves fruit. In many places in Europe, especially small and remote villages, bread making was not a daily affair but an annual one. Bread was enjoyed fresh for only a few days each year before it was stored and meted out slowly for the remaining 363 days before the next bake.

All bread making wasn't like that, of course. In bigger towns it was often a weekly ritual. But you see where I'm going, I think. Bread has been eaten very stale or hard for almost all of its history — ten thousand or so years. Pretzels and crackers are the sole remnants of this time-honored tradition. We served them small so they don't crack our teeth when we bit down on them. Should you wish to make hard pretzels, you can use the recipe below, though I suggest you make them much smaller — only an ounce or so. Once they're baked you can simply dry them out over a period of hours in a very low oven.

The Food Network has kindly requested that I spread the word that they're casting for a new competition show along the lines of The Next Food Network Star. They'll be holding open casting calls soon in Philadelphia, Boston, New York and DC. If you're interested don't quit your day job and go here.

The below pretzel recipe calls for either dipping your pretzels in a lye bath or simply painting them with egg wash. However there is another method that's very commonly used. It involves poaching your pretzels in boiling water to which a large volume of baking soda has been added. Soda, as you most of you folks already know, is an alkaline. It's nowhere near as strong an alkaline as lye, but it will produce a similar, if not nearly as pronounced, effect. The ratio of soda to water required is about half an ounce per 8-ounce cup of water.

But then if you don't have to use boiling water with lye, why must you use it with baking soda? Part of the answer is that the hot water helps the soda dissolve. However the poaching also causes the starch on the outside of the pretzel to gelate, which is to say it causes individual starch molecules to separate from their flour granules and form an interlocking network. This helps hold in the rise of the pretzel in like a girdle, thus maintaining a tight, chewy crumb. This is one of ways in which pretzels resemble bagels.

Why don't you need the girdle effect when you use lye? Simply because the carbonate crust that the lye reaction creates does the job handsomely. It's like a baked-on enamel coating that constrains the rise beautifully all by itself.

Those questions all came in over the weekend, and they're good ones. I'm no chemist, but I'll do my best to answer.

Lye is an alkaline substance, which in chemical terms means it's on the opposite side of the pH scale relative to an acid, but that doesn't mean it's harmless. A strong alkaline, like lye, is every bit as capable of delivering a bad chemical burn as a strong acid. In the past lye was a common household chemical, used in some forms of food preparation but also to make soap. The pioneers in America employed lye for just that purpose.

But where did they get it? The answer is they made it. How? By soaking wood ashes in barrels and collecting the caustic liquid that leached out the bottom. The main chemical ingredient in this kind of homemade lye (correct me if I'm wrong, chemists) was/is calcium carbonate, the same compound that native peoples in Central America have historically used to treat corn to make tortillas. This is the stuff that can be found in many Mexican markets and is commonly referred to as "cal."

That, however is just one type of lye. So-called "Chinese lye" is a mixture of potassium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), and is frequently used in cookery, notably to make rice dumplings and buns.

The lye that's commonly used for European pretzels (and bagels) is sodium hydroxide, also called "caustic soda" which is produced industrially. Prior to its invention (isolation), it's my understanding that Europeans primarily used sodium carbonate, which can be extracted from trees and plants, but is just as frequently mined from alkaline lake beds. This was the compound that peoples dating back to the Egyptians used to wash clothes and preserve food, known as "natron."

What does all this have to do with pretzels? I confess I'm not sure. Only that somehow, somewhere, strong alkalines were introduced into the production of some kinds of northern European breads. Regarding which, I can't say I'm sure that some of the non-European lyes I mentioned would work the same way for pretzel-making. Had I had the time and wherewithal, it would have made an interesting experiment. Oh well. Call it another item on Joe's ever-lengthening "to-do" list.

UPDATE: Reader Bill adds:

Potassium hydroxide is the lye component derived from wood ashes (hardwood). Calcium carbonate (lime) is also present in an even larger proportion.

UPDATE: Reader Bronwyn says:

Might see if I can nab some NaOH and KOH from work and do that wee pretzel lye comparison for you. Can't think there'd be a huge difference, as it's the (OH-) that does the work. Compare with NaNO3 and KNO3 which seem to be able to be used interchangeably in curing meat.