transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:09] Hello, and welcome to Savor, production of iHeartRadio, I'm Anney Reese.
Speaker 2:
[00:12] And I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we have a classic episode for you about pretzels. Yes.
Speaker 1:
[00:19] And it goes a bit, a bit back, we were younger in those days.
Speaker 2:
[00:24] Yeah, this one is from March of 2019. You can hear it in just the clear excitement in our voices. And also in, this might have been the first time that we ran across one of these baked goods episodes where a baked good saved a city during a siege. Because I'm not impressed by that anymore.
Speaker 1:
[00:53] You're desensitized.
Speaker 2:
[00:54] I'm desensitized to the story, yeah. I'm like, oh, who hasn't saved a city during a siege when you're a baked good?
Speaker 1:
[01:04] Do you have a mascot?
Speaker 2:
[01:05] The pretzel does.
Speaker 1:
[01:07] That should be the next question.
Speaker 2:
[01:09] Oh, there you go.
Speaker 1:
[01:10] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[01:11] I'm still impressed by mascots.
Speaker 1:
[01:14] Yes. Well, I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask you anyway. Was there any particular reason this was on your mind to bring back, Lauren?
Speaker 2:
[01:23] Oh, now I'm curious to know what you think the answer is, because I'm pretty sure that I was just browsing through our classics, and a baked good was a thing that we hadn't talked about in a second. And so I was like, yeah, put that one in there. Although, as I was going through the episode, I was like, oh man, we should have run this before Easter because it's, as it turns out, extremely Easter-coded.
Speaker 1:
[01:54] Oh yeah. We don't get that right all too often.
Speaker 2:
[02:02] No, no, we certainly don't.
Speaker 1:
[02:04] Winter holiday topics in the middle of summer were, hey, but you know, in Australia works.
Speaker 2:
[02:11] Yeah. What did you think?
Speaker 1:
[02:14] I think I could look this up and easily solve it, but I'm pretty sure National Pretzel Day just happened.
Speaker 2:
[02:20] No. Oh wow. Okay. Accidentally on time. Love it.
Speaker 1:
[02:25] Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it happens. I was just getting a lot of, in our inbox, a lot of cold call emails from companies that were like, oh, National Pretzel Day. That's why Lauren made it.
Speaker 2:
[02:39] Oh, there you go. No, I was unaware.
Speaker 1:
[02:44] Maybe somehow you're in tune with the pretzel.
Speaker 2:
[02:48] That's probably it, you know, just on right, like on a deeper energetic level. I'm probably just in tune with what's going on with pretzels.
Speaker 1:
[03:00] Makes sense.
Speaker 2:
[03:01] It does. Makes sense. Well, while I investigate this newfound facet of myself, we should probably let former Anney and Lauren take it away.
Speaker 1:
[03:26] Hello, and welcome to Savor, I'm Anney Reese.
Speaker 2:
[03:27] And I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we're talking about pretzels.
Speaker 1:
[03:31] Which, amazingly, is another food that's a funny mascot. The pretzel mascot, I think there's more than one.
Speaker 2:
[03:38] Ooh, this one is high quality, I definitely recommend looking this one up.
Speaker 1:
[03:44] Yes, I do too. One of my favorite things when my mom and I, that we would do when I was growing up, is we would take a trip to the mall, and we would get one of those Auntie Anne pretzels with the honey glaze.
Speaker 2:
[03:57] Ooh, honey glaze, okay, all right.
Speaker 1:
[04:00] So good.
Speaker 2:
[04:01] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[04:01] Yeah, every time I go to a mall, to this day, I'm like, can I get one? No, probably not.
Speaker 2:
[04:08] I mean, you're allowed to.
Speaker 1:
[04:09] Yeah, I definitely want to one day relive it, relive it. And we go to the IMAX at the mall of Georgia, and we would buy those cinnabites, which are just like warm, bite-sized cinnamon sugar pretzels.
Speaker 2:
[04:23] Like the little nuggets?
Speaker 1:
[04:24] Yeah, and we would sneak them into the theater. Those are good times. Already the craving is setting in. That's not good. But regular pretzels, I'm not super into them. I turn them down on airplanes. I do like the ones with peanut butter in the center, but that's peanut butter.
Speaker 2:
[04:40] That's peanut butter related, not pretzel related. Yeah. I prefer a soft pretzel to a hard pretzel, but I love a pretzel. I am a sucker for any kind of pretzel. Pretzel bread, I get the most excited about pretzel bread, and I don't know what I feel like. I feel like the amount of excitement that I experience about it, it's not even disproportionate. It's just like, I don't know why it happens.
Speaker 1:
[05:06] I have a similar thing with a local popsicle vendor, King of Pops.
Speaker 2:
[05:11] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[05:12] Because I don't really like popsicles. I mean, they're fine.
Speaker 2:
[05:14] Sure.
Speaker 1:
[05:14] But I get so excited when I see them. They just were really good at marketing and making themselves seem like difficult to find, I think.
Speaker 2:
[05:21] Ooh, so you're like, oh, man, what a treat.
Speaker 1:
[05:24] But there's literally a King of Pops in this building. I could just walk down the stairs.
Speaker 2:
[05:29] You could.
Speaker 1:
[05:30] But no, no, if I see them in the wild, I'm like, popsicle. Yeah, I understand that. Me and my ex-boyfriend, we were at this big comedy show a couple of years ago, and we hadn't had dinner, and we saw on the menu an $18 super pretzel. And we were very, very intrigued, and we decided to order it on a whim, a very ridiculous, silly whim. The cashier was like, no one's ever ordered that before. Let me check with my manager. I don't actually know what it is. And it became a fiasco. There was all hands on deck. Everyone was trying to figure out the super pretzel. People were going back into the back and like whispering. It took like 30 minutes. But finally, we got this massive pretzel in a pizza box that barely fit out like the order window. It was the size of my torso at least. And it came with two tiny cheese containers to dip it in. It was pretty hilarious. It's one of the first pictures on my Instagram.
Speaker 2:
[06:41] So just a real big pretzel?
Speaker 1:
[06:43] It was just a big, a super pretzel, if you will.
Speaker 2:
[06:46] Oh, I will.
Speaker 1:
[06:48] As you should. It was a waste, but it was a fun waste.
Speaker 2:
[06:53] Well, there you go.
Speaker 1:
[06:55] Yeah. I'm not sure how they did it to this day. I wonder if they like, who knows? Maybe somebody went and picked one up.
Speaker 2:
[07:04] If anyone has any background information on the super pretzel.
Speaker 1:
[07:06] Very important for us to know. Very important. I totally forgot about President George W. Bush, almost choking on that pretzel.
Speaker 2:
[07:13] Oh, yeah, that happened.
Speaker 1:
[07:15] It came up a lot when I was researching. Huh. Well, yeah, the pretzel. The pretzel. But all of this brings us to the question, pretzel, what is it?
Speaker 2:
[07:28] Well, pretzel can mean a lot of things. It's a type of baked good that can be salty or savory or sweet, soft or crunchy. The word can refer to the traditional twisty knot shape that these baked goods come in, though pretzels can also come in other shapes like sticks or nuggets. Other baked goods like sandwich rolls, aforementioned, can be made of pretzel style bread. But, okay, I guess at the essence of pretzel, you've got a snack made of a yeast-raised wheat flour dough that's rolled into a long rope and then wound into a shape that's, it's like a wide, rounded heart with the ends overlapping at the crux of the heart, and the ends are then twisted around each other and pulled down to touch the lower sides of the heart space. In the United States, the ends are separated after twisting and attached one on each side of the heart, forming a shape with three holes. Yeah, in Europe, the ends are often kept together and attached at the same point at the bottom, forming a shape with only two holes.
Speaker 1:
[08:27] What?
Speaker 2:
[08:28] I know.
Speaker 1:
[08:29] Glow my mind.
Speaker 2:
[08:30] Right? The pretzel may be treated or topped in a number of ways and is baked until it reaches the desired firmness. The result has a deep brown crust with a pale interior, a slightly tangy flavor, and a texture that's somewhere from chewy soft to like crispy crunchy.
Speaker 1:
[08:47] Hmm.
Speaker 2:
[08:49] There are a lot of variations. Philly style pretzels are shaped like an elongated figure eight. I know. Hard-baked pretzels tend to be smaller, like bite-sized, often come in other shapes, sticks and twists. Soft-baked ones tend to be bigger. You can use yeast dough or sourdough, plain wheat flour or incorporate other grains. You can top them with cinnamon and sugar, powdered mustard, powdered dill pickle flavoring. Bake them up with cheese on top. You can serve them with all kinds of dipping sauces. Though for the savory ones, whole-grain mustard is perhaps the most common, and cheese sauce perhaps the most delicious.
Speaker 1:
[09:23] Agreed.
Speaker 2:
[09:24] Science fact. You can stuff them with stuff, as Anney mentioned a minute ago.
Speaker 1:
[09:28] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[09:32] Nutrition-wise, it depends on your type of pretzel, perhaps, obviously. Hard snack pretzels have some protein and a tiny little bit of fat, but they're mostly carbs, so they'll fill you up briefly but won't keep you going for too long. Soft pretzels tend to have a little bit more fat, less protein. I mean, neither is ideal. It's bread or like crackers, so it falls into the category of what I would call nutritionally meh. It's not like a decadent treat, but you probably shouldn't plan your daily diet around them if you can otherwise avoid it.
Speaker 1:
[10:04] No.
Speaker 2:
[10:05] Unfortunately.
Speaker 1:
[10:06] Unfortunately. I was on a film set once, and as people probably heard of the craft, it's the snacks that they provide. And I was pretty good about not indulging in all of the candies, but the pretzel, the combos with peanut butter would get me every time. And then I saw the calorie information in them, and I staggered away in shock. I knew it would be high. I didn't know it would be that high. And I haven't really had one since. Sometimes I'll let myself have two.
Speaker 2:
[10:41] We do have a large jar of them here at work.
Speaker 1:
[10:43] Yeah, there are some here, and the temptation is always there.
Speaker 2:
[10:47] I had a couple yesterday while I was researching this article, or this podcast episode thing.
Speaker 1:
[10:53] This thing that we're doing right now. If we look at pretzel numbers, pretzels are the most popular in the United States and Germany. Americans consume an average of 1.5 pounds of pretzels annually, and that comes out to be 324 million pretzels a year in 2013, which comes out to $515 million a year in the US alone. 80% of those come from Pennsylvania. Yes! Also, the average pretzel consumption is much higher in Pennsylvania, about 12 pounds a person.
Speaker 2:
[11:30] Oh, you said it's like 1.5 pounds for the rest of America, but 12 pounds for Pennsylvania?
Speaker 1:
[11:35] 12 pounds! Listeners from Pennsylvania, I mean, right in, does that sound correct?
Speaker 2:
[11:41] I mean...
Speaker 1:
[11:43] That's a lot!
Speaker 2:
[11:44] I lived in Pennsylvania briefly, and I have to say, that sounds about right, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[11:48] Really?
Speaker 2:
[11:48] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[11:50] That's the second time my mind has been blown in the very early part of this episode. Auntie Anne's, that purveyor of soft pretzels usually found in malls or in airports, makes 500,000 pretzels a day. In 2007, Joey Jaws Chestnut ate 21 soft pretzels in 10 minutes and became the world pretzel eating champion.
Speaker 2:
[12:10] The record for largest pretzel is continually contested, but right now, Guinness has the record holder as coming from a San Salvador bakery in 2015. It weighed 1,728 pounds and measured 23 feet and 3 inches long by 13 feet and 3 inches wide. For our metric friends, that's 783.81 kilos and 8.93 meters by 4.06 meters.
Speaker 1:
[12:40] I always wonder about these things. Do they just invite the entire town and then everyone eats pretzel for like a day?
Speaker 2:
[12:46] I think that's basically, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[12:48] Okay, cool. It's not going to waste. Pretzels are a popular bar snack because they make customers thirsty so that you will hopefully order another drink. And famous Seinfeld line, these pretzels are making me thirsty. That was the first episode I ever saw, I remember. Oh, wow. Yeah, because we couldn't get the TV to work. And we were like, you know, tuning.
Speaker 2:
[13:14] No one knows what...
Speaker 1:
[13:16] Tuning it and like hitting it. And I just remember like getting snippets of, these pretzels are making me thirsty. So Seinfeld, go to the episode. Which brings us to, how are they made?
Speaker 2:
[13:30] Oh, OK. All right. The making of pretzels touches on a lot of the areas that make baking such an interesting intersection of sciences. I really nerded out about this. OK. All right. First of all, you're making a yeast dough, which means, yep, we're talking about fermentation. Yeast poop. Baker's yeast is a single celled fungus that basically eats sugars and poops, carbon dioxide, alcohol, and a few other compounds that we humans can experience as flavor. In pretzels, the carbon dioxide bubbles are going to give you that nice puff, a good airy lift in the dough, yeah? The alcohol will largely boil off in the oven, but that and those other compounds help flavor the dough. Recipes recommend allowing the yeast to work in the dough for a full 24 hours to allow all that good flavor stuff to happen before you even shape the pretzels. And at that point, you've probably also got some of that ubiquitous lactic acid bacteria working for you too, creating a little bit of extra tang in the dough. Bacteria poo!
Speaker 1:
[14:34] Whoa! Double whammy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[14:37] After shaping the pretzels, you let them rest again to rise. But then we get to the crust. That delicious crust. Have you ever noticed how pretzels have that huge color contrast, that mahogany brown crust, and basically pure white interior? Well, I mean, they should.
Speaker 1:
[14:56] Ah, okay.
Speaker 2:
[14:57] And that's because the crust is traditionally treated with an alkaline solution before the pretzels are baked. The shaped risen pretzels are dipped in a solution of lye or baking soda dissolved in hot water right before they're baked. And this messes with the surface of the dough in really delicious ways. Okay. We've spoken before on the show about the Maillard reaction. This is a browning process that's a heat activated chain reaction among amino acids and sugars that creates deeper colors and tastier flavors in anything from the surface of a steak to the surface of a loaf of bread. When you dip a pretzel into an alkaline enough solution, some of the complex proteins in the surface of the dough will break down into their component amino acids, which means that you've got more fuel for the Maillard reaction in this treated pretzel dough than you would in like your average bread dough, which makes the crust of the pretzel darker and more flavorful. I didn't see any articles discussing the chew or crisp of the pretzel crust, but I would suppose that similar to how you parboil bagels to gelatinize the starches in the crust and make the crust chewy, a combination of the heat from the alkaline water dip and maybe even the alkalinity itself will create like a lesser but kind of similar chew in a well-made pretzel. That's, I'm guessing, going out on a science limb here.
Speaker 1:
[16:26] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[16:27] If you're looking to make pretzels at home, by the way, you totally can. Getting the shape right is not as easy as they make it look, but technically baking it is no harder than any other yeast dough adventure. Just be careful if you choose to go that lie route, or even with baking soda, because you're creating a very alkaline solution. There are lots of recipes on line with appropriately cautious warnings and procedural notes, because that stuff will burn the heck out of you if you do not respect it.
Speaker 1:
[16:56] Have you ever made pretzels?
Speaker 2:
[16:58] I have not.
Speaker 1:
[16:59] Maybe we should.
Speaker 2:
[17:01] There's something at the back of my brain that's pinging, that maybe when I was a tiny child.
Speaker 1:
[17:07] You remember making the shape?
Speaker 2:
[17:08] Yeah. Or maybe I just did that with, I don't know.
Speaker 1:
[17:11] I feel like that was a Christmas ornament thing that I did, maybe like melted peppermints into that shape. I don't know. Well, maybe one day we'll make pretzels, even though if there's like warnings around it, probably we shouldn't.
Speaker 2:
[17:26] We'll get out those goggles, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[17:27] Yeah. Okay. Now I mean. The pretzel is pretty ubiquitous nowadays, but it used to be really fancy and religious.
Speaker 2:
[17:39] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[17:40] We'll get into that after a quick break for a word from our sponsor. And we're back, thank you, Sponsor.
Speaker 2:
[17:52] Yes, thank you.
Speaker 1:
[17:54] All right, so the first pretzels most likely go back to 6th century Europe, either France, Germany, or Italy. And with all of these food origin stories, it's really difficult to bend down the first, because people were probably doing whatever the thing is earlier than the earliest recorded date. It kind of depends on how you define the ancestor of a thing. Records that get lost or were never made. Same thing with the pretzel, although actually there is no actual documentation from the time to back this up. It's kind of like retroactive. Somebody said it happened later.
Speaker 2:
[18:31] Sure.
Speaker 1:
[18:31] But anyway, okay. The generally accepted story of the pretzel is as follows. In 610 CE, an Italian monk was looking for a way to get his students to pay attention. So he rolled out some dough into ropes, twisted and arranged them so that they looked like hands folded over the chest in prayer.
Speaker 2:
[18:52] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[18:52] Then he baked them up and named them pretiola, the Latin word for little reward, because he gave them the children who memorized their prayers. Or perhaps the original name was preselle, which is the Latin word for little arms. When the pretzel made its way to Germany, it got the name pretzel, pretzel. I think that's a pretty, I can see how that happened.
Speaker 2:
[19:14] Easy jump, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[19:16] Now another piece of this has to do with lint, which was much stricter at this time. No meat, no dairy, no eggs, only one meal a day, and it couldn't be from animals. But pretzels? They were an ideal snack because it was just water, flour, and salt. Catholics in particular once considered pretzels as the official food of lint. In fact, some theorize that pretzels were developed specifically for lint.
Speaker 2:
[19:42] Wow.
Speaker 1:
[19:44] Pretzels are just about the most symbolically religious food there is. I know, right? The folds are meant to represent holding hands in prayer, the three holes, the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son, Holy Ghost. They were seen as good luck as a sign of prosperity and symbolic of spiritual fulfillment. As such, they were often given to the needy.
Speaker 2:
[20:07] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[20:09] Some sources describe the practice of hiding pretzels from children in an early version of the modern-day Easter egg hunt.
Speaker 2:
[20:16] What?
Speaker 1:
[20:17] Can you imagine?
Speaker 2:
[20:18] I can. That's great.
Speaker 1:
[20:20] It is. Side note, I was so competitive at Easter egg hunts as a child, my family put a limit on how many golden eggs I could find, because we had like the, you know, the crim de la crim.
Speaker 2:
[20:30] Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:
[20:31] And everyone else was allowed a two-minute ed start.
Speaker 2:
[20:36] This information does not surprise me at all.
Speaker 1:
[20:41] My mom still does an Easter egg hunt for me to this day. Yeah, it's like just me. She is the best. She she's out there like cheering me on. And I get so competitive. I get into it. I still.
Speaker 2:
[20:56] Even though no one else is playing?
Speaker 1:
[20:58] No, no, every now and then if someone else is home, they'll they'll indulge me. But sometimes it's just me. And we do it at night with flashlight anyway. Yeah. One of the first recorded documentations of a pretzel comes from 1111 CE on the crest of a German bakers guild.
Speaker 2:
[21:17] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[21:18] And some sources mentioned something called an escort pretzel.
Speaker 2:
[21:21] Escort pretzel.
Speaker 1:
[21:22] I love this. So around the same time, since traders attending the Frankfurt Fair were at risk of being robbed, townspeople rode out to meet them bearing gifts of wine and pretzels. And that sounds lovely.
Speaker 2:
[21:35] That does sound... Escort pretzels.
Speaker 1:
[21:38] We need an escort pretzel.
Speaker 2:
[21:40] Okay.
Speaker 1:
[21:40] We gotta bring that back.
Speaker 2:
[21:42] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[21:43] A pretzel was depicted in the 12th century Hortus De Lichiarum. The Hortus De Lichiarum was an illustrated encyclopedia. The first put together by a woman, Herard of Lansburg, who was a German nun. The image in question is sort of a biblical dinner party with Queen Esther and King Ahasuerus. And on their table is a fish, a plate of fish, dishes and goblets, and a single pretzel. And it's very clearly a pretzel.
Speaker 2:
[22:09] It's like obviously a pretzel. Like that is what that is.
Speaker 1:
[22:12] Yeah, yeah. A 1440 prayer book owned by Catherine of Cleves contained a picture of St. Bartholomew with pretzels on all sides, like he's surrounded by pretzels. Pretzels were used as decorations for Christmas trees in 16th century Austria. Love it. And European bakers' guilds frequently used the pretzel as a symbol, and the loops were handy for storing and carrying pretzels. Vendors would carry them on sticks and sell them on streets, similar to bagels or donuts. In past episodes, we talked about that. And modernly, you might see the symbol of a lion holding a pretzel-shaped shield outside bakeries in Austria. This allegedly goes back to 1510 CE, when Austrian bakers and or monks in a monastery, depending on what you read, were doing their pre-dawn pretzel prep and heard the sounds of tunneling under Vienna, Ottoman Turks, during the siege of Vienna. And they rang the warning bell, they let the authorities know, and the king of Austria rewarded them with their own coat of arms. Wow! It's pretty cool. Yeah. And up until this point, the pretzels we've been talking about are of the soft variety. Hard pretzels came on the scene in the late 1600s. Again, multiple versions of the story, but here's a popular one. When a baker in Pennsylvania fell asleep while baking a batch of pretzels, his boss took a spiteful bite out of one of the pretzels to drive his angry point home. But then he was like, oh, these are good. We should sell these.
Speaker 2:
[23:43] This is crunchy and delicious. Let's do this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[23:46] Never mind. Not mad at you anymore. In 16th century Germany, pretzels were a traditional Good Friday food. And apparently on New Year's Day in Germany, children wear pretzels around their necks for luck, a practice that got started in the 17th century. Listeners, let us know.
Speaker 2:
[24:03] I'm picturing more like a necklace with a pretzel on it than like a pretzel that is itself a necklace. Yeah, although I like that second thing.
Speaker 1:
[24:11] Yeah, well, I have made many a pretzel necklace at beer festivals.
Speaker 2:
[24:15] Sure.
Speaker 1:
[24:15] You just get the string, put all the pretzels on it, and you eat them throughout the day. That's very handy. Another pretzel tradition I sincerely hope is true. From what I read, the phrase tying the knot comes from the Swiss wedding tradition where newlyweds would make a wish and break the lucky pretzel, kind of like how we do with a wishbone. This dates back to royal couples in 1614, incorporating the pretzel as a symbol of undying love in their ceremonies.
Speaker 2:
[24:45] I think that the tying the knot thing is like old, like knot tying ceremonies, like where the couple would hold a rope and knot it. But I like this too.
Speaker 1:
[24:55] I know. Well, I hope that they do this.
Speaker 2:
[24:57] I hope that both are true.
Speaker 1:
[24:58] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[24:59] It can be both. Why not both?
Speaker 1:
[25:01] Yes. Why not both? Another tradition. German boys, again, please write in if this is true. German boys would paint a pretzel on the doors of the people they fancied. And in Luxembourg, there was or is something called Pretzel Day where you would give, gave, the person you were in love with a pretzel or a cake shaped like a pretzel. I love it. Okay. Well, listeners, we're giving you a lot of homework here, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[25:29] Yes.
Speaker 1:
[25:31] Historians think pretzels probably made the journey across the Atlantic with the pilgrims and may have even been used to trade with Native Americans. In either case, German immigrants arriving to Pennsylvania in 1710 for sure brought pretzels with them. The first written mention of them in America appeared in 1824. One story goes that the Dutch introduced the pretzel to America. And in 1652, Joachim Wessel was arrested for using good flour, in quotes, to make pretzels for sale to Native Americans when white colonists were using bran flour. The first commercial pretzel bakery opened in Lyditz, Pennsylvania in 1861, operated by baker Julius Sturgis. The story goes Sturgis got the recipe for his pretzels after he provided a free dinner to a man who was struggling to make ends meet. Cool if true, Sturgis served up hard pretzels on purpose. There is a story that he is the one who came up with them. Their longer shelf life made them a popular option. Some historians, yeah, they give him the credit for this invention of the hard pretzel, but some specify on purpose inventor. Mysteries, mysteries.
Speaker 2:
[26:43] Yeah. You can still visit that original bakery, by the way. They've got a sort of like interactive museum there, and the Sturges family is still in the pretzel making business, five generations in.
Speaker 1:
[26:54] Want to visit? Pretzels were a handmade venture until the 1930s. One person could turn out about 40 a minute, which is really impressive to me. The first automated pretzel machine debuted in 1935 from the Redding Pretzel Machinery Company. And this baby could turn out 245 pretzels a minute or about five tons a day.
Speaker 2:
[27:18] In 1931, Hammond's Pretzel Bakery opened its doors in the nearby to Lidditt's Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They are now the oldest continuously family-operated handmade pretzel bakery in the United States.
Speaker 1:
[27:36] This is around the same time the chocolate-covered pretzel was introduced. Those I love. Apparently, chocolate-covered potato chips are older.
Speaker 2:
[27:45] If you've never had those, they are worthwhile.
Speaker 1:
[27:48] Yeah. Oh yeah. Pretzel bread came to us sometime during the 1980s, probably from Chicago.
Speaker 2:
[27:53] Also in the 80s, one Anne Beiler bought a stand in a farmers' market in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which would become the national chain Auntie Anne's.
Speaker 1:
[28:04] And then we get many iterations of pretzels. You get pretzel sticks, those flat pretzels.
Speaker 2:
[28:11] Oh yeah, the pretzel thins.
Speaker 1:
[28:15] Those are good. Those are good.
Speaker 2:
[28:16] Those weird me out.
Speaker 1:
[28:18] Yeah?
Speaker 2:
[28:18] Yeah. I don't think they're right. I don't think it's right to just have a crust and no filling.
Speaker 1:
[28:26] It's not right. It's just not right.
Speaker 2:
[28:27] It's not cool.
Speaker 1:
[28:30] I'm learning a lot about you through this indenture endeavor that we're going on. Man, I really want a soft pretzel now. I can tell you that.
Speaker 2:
[28:40] Yeah, this was a serious craving episode. And we've got a little bit more science for you. But first, we've got one more quick break for a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1:
[28:58] And we're back, thank you, sponsor.
Speaker 2:
[28:59] Yes, thank you. So, I wanted to mention that pretzels come up a lot when math humans want to explain extremely complex theories to lay people.
Speaker 1:
[29:11] Really?
Speaker 2:
[29:12] Yeah, okay, all right. For example, not theory. All right, not theory is a, it's spelled K-N-O-T, not like, not.
Speaker 1:
[29:20] Yeah, like the antithesis of theory.
Speaker 2:
[29:22] Yeah. I can't tell you about that one, but not theory is a branch of mathematics that it examines closed three-dimensional shapes, like a ring would be the simplest mathematical knot in this concept. Other simple examples include an infinity or figure eight, and a trefoil, and a pretzel. The ways in which these knots can be manipulated and their distinct physical properties have applications in everything from chemistry, like molecular knots, to biology, like protein knots, folded proteins, yeah, to physics, because it works as a metaphor for the properties and behavior of subatomic particles in quantum mechanics.
Speaker 1:
[30:06] That's amazing.
Speaker 2:
[30:09] One example of this quantum mechanics thing. Okay. All right. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there were these experiments out of the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia that showed that at any given point, okay, you think of a proton as being a sphere, right? Sure. But these experiments showed that at any given point, a proton might exist as any number of shapes. And the probability of all of those different shapes it might be will smudge out into more or less a rounded sphere on average. But they were saying like you might as well call a proton's real shape a peanut or a doughnut or a pretzel.
Speaker 1:
[30:53] So cool.
Speaker 2:
[30:55] And then in 2016, when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics, they demonstrated the concept with a cinnamon roll, a bagel, and a pretzel. To oversimplify their simplification, the work that they were honoring here was, in their words, theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. I do not understand this very well, but I think that this work has to do with how we can study and identify the state of a quantum system, sort of obliquely, by studying the energy of the electrons in that system. And by bringing out these baked goods, the Academy was making an analogy to the ways that you can identify a baked good obliquely, by studying some of the physical properties of that baked good. Like, how is it knotted? How many holes does it have? I take it that this is super hilarious if you like speak quantum mechanics. And I wish I'd got the joke better and could explain it to y'all, but I just love that they did it.
Speaker 1:
[32:10] Oh, I do too.
Speaker 2:
[32:11] It's beautiful.
Speaker 1:
[32:13] Who knew? Pretzels, cinnamon rolls. It's beautiful.
Speaker 2:
[32:19] So useful for so many quantum mechanical concepts.
Speaker 1:
[32:28] And that brings us to the end of this classic episode. We hope that you enjoyed hearing it for the first time, the second time. Who knows how many times? As much as we enjoyed bringing it back. And update, I looked it up. And a national pretzel day is April 26th. And as we record this, it's April 21st.
Speaker 2:
[32:50] Yeah. So we're heckin timely as heck.
Speaker 1:
[32:54] You and the pretzels, you're resonating. You knew.
Speaker 2:
[32:59] This is such delightful news.
Speaker 1:
[33:03] You're gonna have to look into this and see how deep the connection goes. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[33:08] All right. Fun homework.
Speaker 1:
[33:10] Yes. Well, listeners, as always, we would love to hear your thoughts about pretzels. Any recipes? If you've seen the pretzel mascot. Oh, my gosh.
Speaker 2:
[33:20] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:
[33:20] Yeah. Please let us know. You can email us at hello at savorpod.com.
Speaker 2:
[33:25] We're also on social media. You can find us on Instagram and bluesky at savorpod, and we do hope to hear from you. Savor is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, you can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks, as always, to our super producers, Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and we hope that lots more good things are coming your way.