 Okay we're here at the Renaissance Festival and I tried to get a pretzel while they're out of pretzels with this entire place. So I guess we're gonna have to go back and learn to make our own. What we eat today comes from generations of trial and error, accidental discovery, and ever-expanding trade. We're exploring the origins in the history of some of our favorite foods of today, as well as the tools were invented along the way to make them. My name is Andy and this is how to make everything. The history of the pretzel is a little twisted. Around the year 610 an Italian monk invented the pretzel as a reward to children who learned their prayers. The pretzels were made with strips of baked dough, folded to resemble arms crossing the chest, and were called retiola, or little rewards. However, the modern day interpretation of the historical shape of the pretzel is a little more practical, with the holes being used to hang the pretzels up or to stack them on a central column as shown in this painting from 1681. The Catholic Church played an early role in the significance of the pretzel, as the absence of eggs, lard, and dairy from basic pretzel dough makes it an ideal food to consume during Lent, when these ingredients are expressly forbidden. In the Christian Church pretzels became a precursor to the modern day Easter eggs, with pretzels being hidden on Easter morning. The religious importance of pretzels has always been prevalent in the idiom, tying the knot, has been linked to a 17th century Swiss custom of sealing the bonds of matrimony with a tied pretzel. The symbology meant to invoke good luck in undying love. 17th century children also similarly wore pretzel necklaces on New Year's to symbolize good luck and prosperity for the coming year. 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And if you're quirky, you can add me, and you can team up and defeat our enemies. Download Mech Arena Robot Showdown today. Some mustard here we can grow, the leaves will make a kind of a spicy leaf, but then the seeds that it'll eventually produce can be ground up to make the condiment of mustard. But now they've progressed in their life cycle and grew the flowers, now they're in the process of producing the pods, and inside these pods you have the mustard seeds. Hopefully the best way to harvest these is to just cut the whole plant before they fully mature, then hang them to dry for two weeks, and then everything should be dried and ready to harvest, and you can just start removing the seeds. Meanwhile, for the yeast, we had a wild culture we previously cultivated, as well as the variety of grains we grew in the garden, which included both wheat and rye berries. Like I said, we're making our own pretzel. So here we have the wheat berry, rye berry, our starter, and some water. One at a time. I'm just kidding. Would have been nice if they had it at the restaurant festival. All right, now to do the same thing with the rye berries. Whoa, what? All right, add in the rye berry. All right, we're going to move on to the starter portion. So the yeast is a live culture, so it does not like to be cold. We're going to add it to the warm water and start to mix it in. All right, I'm just going to try to fold her in there. We're going to make the dough shaggy. Pretty cool. It's not super shaggy yet. All right, we got some rock salt, and rock salt is way more potent than table salt. So I'm just going to get a little bit here. Hitting rock salt with a rock. Oh yeah, salt. Probably should have mixed it in beforehand, but I forgot. So you know what? We're doing it now. All right, so I've got the dough ready for the pretzel. I'm going to let it rise overnight, and then do some rolling and shaping. All right, so I got all the mustard I grew, and let go to seed, let it dry out. And now I'm going to collect the seeds and got all the pods because they're dried up. They're pretty brittle and the seeds just kind of fall out. They've already fallen out a bunch, and they're falling out before. And I can tell because where I set these down for just a little bit, are now a whole patch of mustard plants are growing. So there's probably going to be a bunch of mustard here come next spring. I'm just going to hit this with a stick. But the first step is really important. You need to get your little butterfly guy, and you got to get him on his perch. So he's out of the way, and now he'll get going. I've already got a fair amount of stuff in there. I've got a lot of seeds already. I'm going to flip the bones a little bit. As far as what the seeds all sifted and separated, best we could. A small little bit of fiber here and there, but that shouldn't hurt anything. Just add a little extra character. Just going to grind up half of the mustard to make a paste, and then leave the other half for coarse ground mustard. Previous projects, got some beer, got some vinegar, and some sugar for my sugar beets. I hold these proof overnight, and start kneading them a little bit, and start making some pretzels. That seems pretty doughy, but a little stiff, but I dried out too much, but I think it's going to work pretty good. Some nice elasticity to it. So now we have the pretzels made. We're going to do a little process to kind of induce the browning on the outside to give it a mylod reaction, and for that use an alkaline. And this is where the secret ingredient of drain cleaner comes from. So we have a lye we made in our soap episode, but first we're going to do it with a little something, a little bit less caustic, which is soda ash, which is the compound we got from a lake in Wyoming that we actually used it to make the lye in our soap episode. So we're going to try both ways and see what gives a better result. So we have a solution to that. It's about six percent. And we're going to put the pretzel in there for 30 seconds on one side, flip it, put it on the other side, and then we'll be ready to bake it. It looks like it worked. It's a little bit yellower now. And now we have the lye solution. This is a little bit more dilute at four percent. It should be a lot more caustic. So you can tell it worked because it's yellow. Well, it means it worked. And just to be safe, we're going to dip it in the water and rinse it. Next to bake them. God, look at that. All right. Well, they're baked. So the first test, let's see if there's still lye on it. Well, soap, at least you can stick your tongue to it. And if you feel a bit of a zap, that means there's lye. Let's see what happens. Let's give it a shot. Looks pretty, pretty well baked. Maybe a little dough in the middle, but a mustard dip. That's pretty good. Very spicy. And don't hurt my nose. It smells spicy. Let me try the pretzel without mustard. It is cooked all the way through. Okay. I finally got my pretzel. The pretzel. Yeah, I like it. Let's compare the two. I think the soda ash one did turn out a little better. It was a little over baked because it's like burnt taste to it. Yeah, they're both good. This one, I think, was a little bit better. It's just like a pretzel, but just a little bit heartier. The flour just isn't as refined. The mustard is really spicy. Yeah, it just smells like horseradish. Potent. I don't think I've had mustard that potent. All right, so growing all the wheat and the mustard, doing all the prep work, we're bringing in about $189 for these two pretzels. Worth it.