(Earth Eats theme music, composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey)

KAYTE YOUNG: From WFIU in Bloomington Indiana, I'm Kayte Young and this is Earth Eats.

ERIC SCHEDLER: You want to be very artistic about it, you want to leave a little knob of dough at the end, so it's got this fat belly in the morning, and then these skinny arms that taper out to the end and then a little bit of a knob right there.

KAYTE YOUNG: On today's show we learn how to make German style soft pretzels from Eric Schedler of Muddy Fork Bakery. We also revisit a conversation with IU Food Researcher Angela Babb. She breaks down food policy at the federal level to help us make sense of some of the food systems we've been reexamining this year in light of the global pandemic. And Harvest Public Media checks in with farmers growing hemp for the first time in 2020. That's all just ahead, stay with us.

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RENEE REED: Earth Eats is produced from the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana. We wish to acknowledge and honor the indigenous communities native to this region and recognize that Indiana University is built on indigenous homelands and resources.  We recognize the Miami, Delaware, Potawatomi, and Shawnee people as past, present, and future caretakers of this land.

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KAYTE YOUNG: Back in 2018 we spent some time on the show exploring the farm bill just as it was about to be reauthorized. As we approach the start of the new administration I thought it might be a good time to revisit the farm bill discussion we had with IU scholar Angela Babb. She does a good job of explaining some of the federal policies that guide our food system. Which we have been examining this past year with new eyes. The coronavirus crisis has revealed inequities and problems of resiliency in our food system. From long supply chains to emergency food assistance. The farm bill deals with agriculture and also with SNAP benefits. SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and used to be called Food Stamps. 

Angela Babb is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ostrom Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis here at Indiana University. She has studied the farm bill extensively with a particular interest in SNAP. Angela Babb spoke with producer Alex Chambers first to help him understand some of the history of the farm bill and how it ends up including so many things that don't seem to have much to do with farming. Alex started by asking Angela to explain the origins of the farm bill.

ANGELA BABB: It started in the 1930's as a way to help farmers after the dust bowl in a very volatile market already as agriculture is. After the dust bowl farmers really needed some financial supports. President FDR signed the first Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933 which basically puts production controls down to help regulate commodity prices and provided grain reserves for farmers to set aside product when there was too much on the market that was driving down prices. So the Agricultural Adjustment Act, now we consider it the Farm Bill, was put in place to help farmers particularly after the dust bowl, secure their incomes. But it's changed very much.

KAYTE YOUNG: Yeah it has changed a lot since then. Now the Farm Bill directs about 90 billion dollars in annual federal spending.

ANGELA BABB: 80% of that is for nutrition assistance programs, most of that being SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps and then the rest going into the emergency food assistance program which is the funding for food banks.

ALEX CHAMBERS: So how did that happen?

ANGELA BABB: Well it's got a long-complicated history. So the first food stamp program was in 1939. It was just three years after the first farm bill, and this first food stamp plan looked very different than what we have now. It was a system in which you buy stamps and then receive extra stamps only for buying surplus commodities. So a person would go to a Department of Ag office, buy a dollar in orange stamps that can be used on any kind of food and then would receive 50 cents in blue stamps that have to be used on surplus commodities. Those were at the time butter, eggs, pork, lard, dried beans, wheat flour, corn meal, things like that.

ALEX CHAMBERS: What do you mean by surplus commodities?

ANGELA BABB: So things that were being produced at such great degree that the price was being driven down by the great amount being on the market.

ALEX CHAMBERS: So that sounds like it was really helping the farmers out.

ANGELA BABB: It really was and actually farmers were actually destroying their surpluses until the discourse around the program changed from one of hunger relief to one of surplus distribution. There was actually a lot of contestation around that first plan, it was viewed as a shameful threat to the free market. It was viewed as unamerican, kind of a charitable hand out to folks that needed to be pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.

ALEX CHAMBERS: And this was in the 30's?

ANGELA BABB: Yes.

ALEX CHAMBERS: Like the height of the Depression?

ANGELA BABB: In 1939, yeah. It was controversial from the very beginning. Some of the protestant ethic and kind of American ideologies around what people deserve and handouts versus gaining the system. That's been there since the very beginning. Even at time when, like you said, right after the great depression, there's still this stigma around poor households getting any assistance from the state. So legislators started framing it differently in order to have farmers be more receptive to the program and to stop destroying their surplus instead of funneling it into these networks for needy families. And unfortunately that first program ended about 1943 because with the war there weren't really enough farmers and enough surplus at that point. So the program ended and didn't start up again until the 60's.

ALEX CHAMBERS: And what brought the program back?

ANGELA BABB: Well there was still a need. Slowly people were starting to realize that folks kind of at the margins were still experiencing hunger and there was a call, especially from legislators representing urban areas realizing that there was extreme poverty that needed to be addressed. So again the issue was between representatives from urban, versus representatives from rural areas, and the compromise came down to the rural communities being able to distribute their surplus and the urban communities being able to access food.

ALEX CHAMBERS: Okay so that makes sense but I'm curious about what the debate was that lead to that compromise.

ANGELA BABB: I know that one thing that was really important and this was after the pilot program, it was 1969. When CBS put out a documentary it was about an hour long, it was called Hunger in America, and they visited four different communities across the U.S. to show that poverty and hunger was prevalent among Native American communities, among Mexican American communities, the rural white populations on the east coast. That poverty was hidden. And that CBS documentary really kind of pulled the wool off of people's eyes and after that we see the food stamp program of 1977, which is the model that we have today. There's no purchase requirement, there's no restriction to surplus commodities, basically if you are within the poverty threshold you are eligible for food stamps.

In 1984 we saw the first electronic benefits transfer cards, the EBT cards that everyone uses today on food stamps. They've been used in all states now as of 2004. Oh and I forgot to say that actually before 1977 the pilot programs of the 40's and the 60's weren't in all states. And they had very different rules from state to state on how many you had to buy. Sometimes you had to buy a whole month's supply of orange stamps to get the blue stamps and that was keeping people from being able to afford them at all. And that's another thing exposed by the CBS documentary, that people couldn't afford the food stamp program in the first place. So they had to eliminate the purchase requirement.

ALEX CHAMBERS: So it's set up to help partly the farmers. Does it do that?

ANGELA BABB: Originally it did really help the small, medium scale family farmers. And today still we see a lot of farmers dependent on the commodity programs out of the Farm Bill. But the greatest percentage of financial support out of the Farm Bill is going toward the large-scale commodity producers, those growing corn and soy, wheat and cotton, and now peanuts. And we see a lot less of that funding going towards the small-scale farmers, especially those in specialty crops.

ALEX CHAMBERS: Like vegetables?

ANGELA BABB: Fruits and vegetables, legumes.

ALEX CHAMBERS: Wow. Why are those specialty crops?

ANGELA BABB: You know that's a great question. They should be mainstream crops. I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the crops themselves. So corn and soy were very easily mechanized and industrialized agriculturally, and there's also the political side of it, the support, the lobbying support that we see from big agro businesses that has a solid interest in subsidizing corn and effectively subsidizing meat and dairy production.

ALEX CHAMBERS: By way of the corn.

ANGELA BABB: Mhm.

ALEX CHAMBERS: Right. And there's a trickle down in the sense that in calling the vegetables and fruits specialty crops it makes them less available to people because they're more expensive, they're not subsidized as thoroughly. Right?

ANGELA BABB: Yeah, they just recently in the last farm bill became eligible for the crop insurance programs. So that was a major benefit to those specialty crop growers, but they still aren't receiving the subsidies which are part of the commodity programs, which are separate from the crop insurance programs. So with the commodity programs, basically a farmer can say I'm going to grow this many acres of corn and they receive the money to grow that corn, they're guaranteed a certain price.

KAYTE YOUNG: That discussion helped me to understand how the Farm Bill ended up including the nutrition assistance program and how it is that corn, soybeans and wheat became the largest commodity crops. They talked about how it got started but I'm curious about why it continues to be this way. Why are the food assistance programs still included in the Farm Bill? Later on in the show we have Part II of Alex's conversation with Angela Babb about some of the problems that come up due to the glaring conflict of interest with the USDA being responsible for marketing and distributing the surplus commodities and also being the agency that sets nutrition guidelines for government food assistance programs. Stay tuned for that, plus the soft pretzel recipe we promised from Muddy Fork. That's all just ahead.

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The most recent farm bill legalized hemp production nationwide but left individual states in charge of the oversight. As the crop continues to roll out across the Midwest, some states are seeing more success than others. But as Harvest Public Media's Dana Cronin reports, farmers generally remain optimistic about hemp's future.

DANA CRONIN: 0.3% is hemp's magic number. That's the level of tetrahydrocannabinol that distinguishes hemp from marijuana. And one of the few things the federal government regulates. Jay Kata didn't quite make the cut.

JAY KATA: We were the first crop in Iowa to test "hot". We were more than twice the limit of THC in our plants.

DANA CRONIN: He and his colleagues who run 4M farms in southeast Iowa had no other choice.

JAY KATA: We had to mow everything down and burn it.

DANA CRONIN: Kata says growing hemp is hard work. Unlike row crops most things have to be done by hand.

JAY KATA: I have a newborn baby, so I spent all summer instead of playing with her, I was weeding the field. We were filthy and we were dirty, and we were sweaty, and it sucked and it was hot and it was miserable. And after all that it's like, "That's cool, we're just gonna light that on fire."

DANA CRONIN: Kata isn't the only one. About 13% of Iowa's hemp crop came above the legal THC threshold. In Missouri it was about 9%. That's largely because for many states like Iowa and Missouri this was the first year of legal hemp production.

ROBIN PRUISER: Anytime you start something up I think you have some highs and some lows and some things you didn't see coming at you.

DANA CRONIN: Robin Pruiser oversees the hemp program for Iowa's department of agriculture. She says there've been a whole host of challenges for farmers this year including the amount of sheer manual labor. 

ROBIN PRUISER: It's like having a tomato garden that's like 5 acres or however big compared to just your little kind of more typical garden in the backyard. 

DANA CRONIN: Producers across the Midwest struggled with other issues in the field this year like pests and weeds, but it didn't get much easier once the hemp was harvested. Most hemp grown in the Midwest is for CBD or cannabidiol which is nonpsychoactive ingredient found in the cannabis plant. Extracting the CBD requires a processor. But because the industry is still so new there's a severe lack of licensed processors across the region. 

DAVID LAKEMAN: We have now licensed 364 hemp processors for what is at this exact moment in time exact 800 licensed hemp growers. 

DANA CRONIN: David Lakeman manages the division of cannabis regulation at the Illinois department of AG. He says the gap between growers and processors has narrowed slightly this year. But some more experienced farmers have figured out a workaround by acquiring their own processing licenses. Farmers like Andy Huston whose been growing hemp in Illinois for three years now. 

ANDY HUSTON: The CBD that's in our products came off of our farm. We know exactly where it's been, we know exactly how it was raised. 

DANA CRONIN: Because he has dual licenses Huston can grow the hemp, extract the oil himself, and then sell different infused products on site. It's a model that's worked well for him, and along with a great growing season this year Huston says he's optimistic about hemp's future in the state. 

ANDY HUSTON: Well hemp is gonna be around. I mean it works too good not to be around. 

DANA CRONIN: Not only does the product work well in terms of relieving aches and pains, Huston says hemp also loves the midwestern climate. Not to mention the CBD market continues to grow. David Lakeman at Illinois Department of AG says lookout corn and soybeans. 

DAVID LAKEMAN: I think that within the next 5-10 years hemp will be in terms of the dollar amounts, one of the top three agricultural exports of the state of Illinois. 

DANA CRONIN: He says hemp's medical and industrial potential plus the ingenuity of growers means the crop's future is bright. I'm Dana Cronin, Harvest Public Media. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Find more from this reporting collective at Harvest Public Media dot org. 

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Kayte Young here, this is Earth Eats. Earlier in the show we shared a conversation from 2018 with Angela Babb. She's a postdoctoral research fellow at the Ostrom workshop in political theory and policy analysis here at Indiana University. She has studied the food assistance portion of the farm bill extensively with a particular focus on the Thrifty Food Plan. Before this I hadn't heard of the Thrifty Food Plan, it's basically food budgeting. The USDA looks at the amount of money that a household would need in order to buy food, that's how they allocate how much money goes to snap recipients. We'll start the second half of this conversation with a review of what the USDA is and then talk about a conflict of interest built into what they do. 

ANGELA BABB: The USDA is the largest most diverse department out of the U.S. government. They are overseeing marketing support for farmers, they're overseeing rural development, and nutrition assistance and forestry. The clearest conflict of interest is between the marketing of agricultural goods and the development of nutritional guidelines and nutritional assistance programs. Historically those agricultural goods that we're producing are corn, and soy and wheat. At the same time the nutritional guidelines are directing people to eat the specialty crops, the fruits, and vegetables and legumes that aren't supported financially by the farm bill. So it's pretty ironic telling folks in poverty to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables when those are more expensive than the cheap grains that have been processed into millions of different products at this point. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: Right, which are in the boxes in the middle of the supermarket and they're more affordable and... yeah, right. 

ANGELA BABB: Yeah so the suggestion is to get the food stamp program, or the nutrition assistance programs and the dietary guidelines out of the USDA and hand them over to the Department of Health and Human Services. Yeah so that's the call but the USDA has been reluctant to get rid of their part in the nutritional assistance programs because those have always been an outlet for the surplus commodities that they're supporting through the farm bill. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: The lobbies, or the parts of the USDA that have an interest in supporting corn, soy, wheat these large-scale commodity crops that are being subsidized, want to hold onto SNAP because it's a way to move those commodities within the U.S. Is that right? 

ANGELA BABB: Yeah, SNAP and EFAP

ALEX CHAMBERS: What is EFAP? 

ANGELA BABB: So the Emergency Food Assistance Program is the direct line to the food banks and the commodity boxes that are then distributed to senior citizens and to native American reservations and under Trump's new proposal, to just about every household on SNAP. It seems less clear now that the food stamp program has changed so that people presumably have a choice on how to use their food stamps, but economically when they get to the store that choice is really limited because of the relative price of foods at the store. It's still those cheap processed corn and soy products that are the most affordable and the most accessible to folks on SNAP. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: What do you think would be a good next step in terms of reorganizing all of this?(Laughs) How would you fix the world Angela Babb? 

ANGELA BABB: That's a loaded question, I'll do my best. I mean to be totally real with you I would say we have to get out of the frame of food security and think about food sovereignty. And the ability of farmers to have a real choice in what they're growing, to have foods valued not in their market price but in their nutritional and their cultural values. And to have folks struggling in poverty to have a more dynamic safety net program. 

I personally study the Thrifty Food Plan which is this model diet that underlies the SNAP allotment, so it determines how much people get in food stamps. And the calculation needs to be changed, it's not enough money for people to afford a really nutritious culturally appropriate diet. So we need the safety net there, we need to have SNAP or something similar in place but the program itself needs to change quite a bit and I would be a proponent too of shifting the regulation of it over to the Health and Human Services Department. 

I think it's really important to recognize that there's plenty of food, the issue is not the availability of food, we currently produce more than twice what we need in this country, but what we're producing is not ecologically sustainable, it's not culturally appropriate for most Americans, and the way that we've prioritized cheap food and convenient food and driven down the value of food has terrible implications for folks in poverty expected to survive on that cheap processed food, to survive on the surplus or basically the waste of large agro business. 

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ALEX CHAMBERS: Can you say a little bit more about the cultural appropriateness, or lack thereof? 

ANGELA BABB: Yeah so one thing I find really alarming is in the Thrifty Food Plan that determines the budget that these SNAP households have to live on, there is an assumption that households are consuming over three cups of liquid milk every day. The reason for that is because of the way we've subsidized corn, we've effectively subsidized dairy. And now milk has become the cheapest form of protein and it's been fortified with some vitamins. So there are roughly 1 in 4 Americans that are lactose intolerant. Globally 60% of the population is lactose intolerant. It is not typical for folks to be able to digest lactose after the age of 2. But the dairy lobby has been very effective in maintaining those subsidies and maintaining their interests within the farm bill. 

And even the educational part of SNAP, the SNAP program trains folks that are lactose intolerant to consume more and more milk to try to build a tolerance, rather than respect the fact that people are lactose intolerant they don't need or want to be drinking that surplus dairy. And frankly it's racist too when you realize how people of color are disproportionately more likely to be lactose intolerant. Something like close to 100% of native Americans, 90% of African Americans, 80% of Asian Americans, like I think 60% of Hispanic Americans. So it's really not culturally appropriate to be expecting these folks to, one to live on that much dairy when their bodies don't need it or want it. But also to survive on those processed foods high in sugar, and salt that are leading to issues of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and hypertension, etcetera etcetera. 

ALEX CHAMBERS: Right. That's really fascinating to hear about the dairy and the ways that the actual diet itself that gets laid out is itself has racial implications. Is itself racist, I should say. 

ANGELA BABB: It really is, I mean it's institutionalized racism, yet another form of it. 

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KAYTE YOUNG: Before this conversation I was unaware of the fact that many people of color are lactose intolerant, and I didn't realize that milk was one of the subsidized commodity crops. I usually think of corn and soybeans, but not milk. This interview made me want to learn more about the Thrifty Food Plan and how it's determined. We ended up inviting Angela Babb back on the show to go into more detail. You can find that conversation on our website. It's a rather riveting tale involving attempted government secrecy and Angela Babb filing a Freedom of Information Act request. Check it out at Earth Eats dot org. Oh and you can hear Alex Chamber's latest project, The Age of Humans. Find that wherever you listen to podcasts. 

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This is Earth Eats, I'm Kayte Young. Freshly made soft pretzels are a treat we don't often think of making at home. And here in Bloomington Indiana, you don't need to. You can get your weekly pretzel fix from Muddy Fork Bakery. These days you can order online or head over to the winter market at Switchyard Park Pavilion on Saturdays. Muddy Fork's Eric Schedler learned pretzel making informally at a village bakery in southern Germany when he was 20 years old. And he's willing to pass his secrets on to you dear listeners of Earth Eats. 

ERIC SCHEDLER: So today we are going to make German style soft pretzels. And by German style I mean dipped in real lye solution. It's not too strong. The typical way to do it is to dip, is to put it in a 4% lye solution so it's actually a lot less caustic than what you would make if you're making soap. You can stick your fingers in it, and they don't burn off immediately, although I do suggest wearing gloves, especially if you have any cuts at all on your fingers, they will burn immediately in the lye. 

KAYTE YOUNG [INTERVIEWING]: So what is lye? 

ERIC SCHEDLER: Sodium hydroxide. A lye solution is very basic. And it reacts with the dough to change the chemistry in the outer layer of the dough and then when it bakes the lye dissipates but it causes a much higher amount of caramelization reactions in the surface of the dough as it bakes and that gives it that characteristic deep brown, reddish brown kind of color and a certain flavor that you just associate with pretzels. 

KAYTE YOUNG: So if you don't happen to have lye sitting around in your pantry, you can use like baking soda solution? Is that what most people do? 

ERIC SCHEDLER: You can do that, I've done it. People often recommend a boiling baking soda solution although I will warn you that it's hard to keep a pretzel in its shape when you put it in boiling water, and that may work better for making rolls than for actual pretzels. But if you wanna take the plunge, or if you already make soap or wanna make some soap you can buy a little bottle of lye beads and make yourself a little solution. Pretzel dough is almost a straight bread dough with the one addition of a little bit of fat in the dough. Most people use butter, you can use lard. Actually the pretzels that we sell in our bakery we use lard because we wanted to try to use as many local ingredients as we could, and you can buy lard locally. And you can't, if you're a bakery, you can't legally buy butter locally. Because all of the butter that's available is raw milk butter. 

So to make pretzels we're gonna measure out the water and mix in the yeast and let the yeast dissolve. This recipe is gonna make six 4oz pretzels. So we need 255 grams of water and we need two grams of yeast. And one gram of yeast is about equal to a quarter teaspoon, so we're gonna use half a teaspoon of yeast. It's hard to measure a gram or two even on a really good scale, so having a couple of conversions is really nice. Speeding it along with the whisk a little bit. My next ingredient is the butter, and I don't want the fat to hit the undissolved yeast because then the yeast could just get frozen in the butter and not hydrate. 

(Sound of whisking)

Alright, here's our melted butter. We measured out 35 grams of butter and stuck it in the oven to melt. My favorite butter for baking is Kerrygold butter which is the butter we use for our croissants. Then we just need to add the flour and the salt and when I have oil or butter or any kind of floating fat in the dough I try to move the water as I'm adding the flour so that I don't get flour to only absorb fat. I want to get the flour into the water. The best way to do this is to take a different bowl and measure the flour out. Then we can just dump it in quickly and stir it as we dump in the flour. So we want 425 grams of flour. This is an all-purpose flour, you don't want for pretzels to use a flour that has too much protein or too high of a gluten content in it because it will make the pretzels hard to stretch. We want 8 and a half grams of salt which is going to be slightly less than 2 teaspoons. 

So we have our wet measured out we have our dry measured out and with a spoon I'm just gonna stir this butter water mixture while I add the flour. Pretzel dough is also a pretty stiff dough that's kind of important because you have to be able to work with it to roll it out, shape it into pretzels. And I believe the reason for the fat in it, and you wouldn't want to do this with oil you'd want to use butter, lard, or shortening, is that after you form the pretzels you chill them and that makes them firmer and easier to handle while you're dipping them in the lye, getting them into the oven without destroying them. 

Alright I've done what I can with the spoons, so I'm going to use my hands a little bit to knead this dough a little bit until it gets more smooth and evenly incorporated. And I'm doing that by tugging at the dough at the edge of the bowl and pressing it down into the middle, giving that bowl about a quarter turn and repeating that motion over and over again. Just in the bowl. The mess is all contained in the bowl. And we'll do this for a few minutes until everything is evenly incorporated. 

(Sound of dough being kneaded in metal bowl)

Okay I'm about done mixing here and the dough is looking smoother, although it's still kind of raggedy at this point, it gets really smooth when it sits and rests. But this pretzel dough is like I said is pretty stiff, so everything comes clean off the bowl when you're mixing it up. There we have it. I set it to rest. 

KAYTE YOUNG [VOICEOVER]: The dough is gonna rest covered at room temperature for a few hours, but you'll still need to tend to it. 

(Timer beeping)

ERIC SCHEDLER: Op! You know what that means it's time to do? Time to fold our dough. If you have a kitchen timer going then you won't forget. Every 30-60 minutes to fold your dough. And this pretzel dough should usually get three folds, not more than that or you'll make it too strong and it'll be harder to roll out your pretzels. So you should notice the dough getting smoother every time you do a fold. And we're doing that same motion we use for mixing where I'm pulling the dough from the outside edge into the middle and I'm gonna go once around the bowl and then cover it back up, set my timer. For pretzels I'll set the timer for 60 minutes, after three hours it's had three folds and it's ready to cut up into pretzels. 

KAYTE YOUNG [VOICEOVER]: So just to recap, we mix the dough, knead it until it's smooth, let it rest for three hours folding it once each hour. Then the dough is ready to be divided and shaped into pretzels. 

ERIC SCHEDLER: Our pretzel dough has been fermenting away for a few hours. And we're turning that dough out onto the table, and we're gonna cut our dough into 4oz pieces for pretzels. You want to flatten your dough; it'll make it easier to start to roll out that big long pretzel. So I've got a little bit of flour and another tool which is called a bench knife or a bench scraper or a dough knife. It's a little rectangle of metal with a handle on it. Okay, just add flour to make it not stick, but not too much. And you can see how nice and smooth the dough gets. I'm measuring them to 120 grams, just over 4oz each. 

You want to roll your pretzel like three feet long, so the dough doesn't usually want to stretch that far all at once. So we're gonna roll it in two phases, we're gonna roll up that rectangle into a strand and I easily get it around 16-18 inches long. So the motion that I'm doing is I'm taking each piece, which should be cut sort of rectangular, pressing it down, flat, and sometimes I even tug at the edges a little to make it longer, a more elongated rectangle. Then I roll it up from the long edge. And pinch it down and then I roll with my hands. 

When you're rolling a strand you're pressing down using a combination of pressing weight down on the table against the strand and also pulling the dough outward. So you're constantly putting your hands back in the middle and moving back and forth moving your hands towards the edge and back to the middle again, pushing towards the edge. And you don't wanna push the dough farther than it wants to go, just let it rest. You can let them sit on your table and then cover them with plastic while they're resting. Now these pretzels are gonna need about 10-20 minutes to rest before we can roll them a second time. 

KAYTE YOUNG [VOICEOVER]: You might be tempted to rush it at this point, skip the resting and just get on with shaping the pretzels. Don't. You'll just get frustrated. The dough rope that you're rolling out simply won't stretch to the length that you need it to unless it has time to relax. So walk away. Go clean up the kitchen. Or better yet, relax yourself. Go read a book in a hammock for 20 minutes. Then you can finish shaping the pretzels, like Eric is about to do. 

ERIC SCHEDLER: And I'm gonna take them back off of the tray and try to stretch them out to 3-3.5 feet long and twist them. Just gonna roll them, and I'm gonna avoid thinning out the middle too much because that's the belly of the pretzel. You want to be very artistic about it you wanna leave a little knob of dough at the end, so it's got this fat belly in the middle, and then the skinny arms that taper out to the end, and then a little bit of knob right there. 

And then the way that the Germans do it is they pick up the ends and they toss the pretzel and let it fall back down and towards the ends of the arms you've made sort of the way where the arms cross. And the twist needs to be where they cross once and then cross back. So that each arm goes back to its side of the dough and then you can sort of stick it up there on the ends. 

To rest the pretzels I suggest a board or a sheet pan with a cloth over the top of it so that the pretzels don't get touch. And we'll put that in the fridge to let them firm up, cause they're definitely floppy and with that butter in the dough it'll get nice and firm and hard when they go in the fridge. 

KAYTE YOUNG: That's right, he's letting them rest, again. This time get your lye bath ready and set up your workstation for dipping the set pretzels and laying them out on a baking sheet. 

ERIC SCHEDLER: So we are gonna dip the pretzels in lye, put salt on them, and score them with a razor blade. And as with deep frying you wanna have everything ready when you're about to handle lye. 

KAYTE YOUNG [TO ERIC]: So you're definitely wearing gloves, food grade. 

ERIC SCHEDLER: If I had cuts on my hands I would put two pairs of gloves because sometimes the gloves rip, and it will burn right away if you have a cut. The way we do it, on the large scale is we have a rectangular tub and a couple of screens and we rest the pretzels on one screen and then weigh them down with another screen to get them stay submerged. At home I would just mix as little lye as you need so you don't have to waste and then just hold it down with your gloved hand under the liquid for about 5 seconds. Pretzels that have been dipped in lye you have to use a silicone base parchment. You can't use any other material, well in particular you can't use something called kryolan because it will bond to the pretzels. Which is what cheaper parchments usually are made of. 

Alright so I've dipped the pretzels. I have a little minute to reshape them on the tray before they get kind of stuck. Pretzel salt! Which is some kind of salt that's been like, it's not coarse pieces cause those are hard, it's some kind of thing that's been like pressed together into little balls of salt. And sprinkle the pretzels especially the bellies. 

And we're gonna score them with a sharp blade right along the belly. And that's gonna give the pretzel a place to expand that will look pretty. Typically we would be baking pretzels after the bread's finished. And so the oven will be in the 500's and they will take about 8-12 minutes at that kind of temperature. 

KAYTE YOUNG [VOICEOVER]: If you recall from when Muddy Fork has been on Earth Eats before, they do all the baking in a large scale, wood fired brick oven that they heat to very high temperatures each week to bake their bread, croissants and other goodies. As the oven cools they bake items that require lower temperatures, like pretzels. In your home oven, 500 might be the highest it goes. If so just start checking them at around 8 minutes. You want them to be fully browned and caramelized on the outside and not doughy in the center. Once they're out of the oven, let them rest again, ever so briefly, to cool slightly. But you know, soft pretzels are best hot and fresh from the oven.

ERIC SCHEDLER: A German baker would tell you that a pretzel should be fat in the belly which is also where we scored it and soft in that part, with skinny arms, and crunchy in the arms, so you get a range of textures in your pretzel. And you can eat it hot like we're going to, another way that they're eaten in southern Germany is you can slice open the pretzel from one shoulder to the other shoulder and put cold butter on it. It's called a "brezeln", it's really good. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Alright well let's try it. Do I try the fat part or the skinny part? 

(Sound of crunching)

ERIC SCHEDLER: And you can taste that signature pretzel flavor in the skin, which is that reaction of the dough with the lye. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Yeah it has such a crisp but thin outside. 

ERIC SCHEDLER: Yes, that's right. That's another feature of the lye. 

KAYTE YOUNG: And then very soft in the middle. And the whole thing is just rich with flavor. Almost buttery. 

ERIC SCHEDLER: Yes, and it has a little butter in it. 

KAYTE YOUNG: That's true. Just the right amount of salt as well. 

ERIC SCHEDLER: We like to make some of our plain croissants into pretzel croissants by dipping them in lye and salting them. And that savory flavor of the pretzel flavor and the salt really goes well with the butter. It makes it taste extra buttery. 

KAYTE YOUNG: Yeah. Well it's very nice, thank you. 

(Music)

I know you're craving pretzels now. Well I know I am. You'll find Muddy Fork Bakery at the Winter's Farmers' Market here in Bloomington. You can place an online order, or you can follow Eric Schedler's detailed instructions for making your own. You'll find the recipe at Earth Eats dot org and you can review these audio instructions anytime through the podcast service of your choice or by going to the website and finding this episode, Earth Eats dot org. That's all we have time for today, thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. 

RENEE REED: The Earth Eats team includes Eobon Binder, Spencer Bowman, Mark Chilla, Toby Foster, Abraham Hill, Payton Knobeloch, Josephine McRobbie, Harvest Public Media and me, Renee Reed.  

KAYTE YOUNG: Special thanks this week to Alex Chambers, Angela Babb, and Eric Schedler.

RENEE REED: Our theme music is composed by Erin Tobey and performed by Erin and Matt Tobey. Additional music on the show comes to us from the artist at Universal Productions Music. Earth Eats is produced and edited by Kayte Young and our executive producer is John Bailey.