April 25, 2026

WEEKLY MENU 04.26.26

Weekly Menu 04.26.26: Let’s get twisted – it’s Pretzel Day 🥨

We’ve got a couple of pretzel dishes on tap during the Weekly Menu 04.26.26 – in addition to the everyday noshing we do with pretzels around here. Hard pretzels, peanut butter-stuffed pretzels, pretzels in snack mix: they all get in on the action.

What makes pretzels, well, pretzels? LYE, baby.

What Is Lye?
Lye, or sodium hydroxide (NaOH), is a strong alkaline substance that plays an essential role in creating traditional pretzels. While it may sound surprising to use such a substance in food, lye is perfectly safe when handled correctly and is diluted in water to create a bath in which pretzel dough is briefly dipped before baking.

This lye solution triggers the Maillard reaction—a chemical process that occurs when amino acids and sugars in the dough react to create the deep brown color, rich flavor, and unique texture of pretzels. Without this critical step, pretzels would lack their signature crispy exterior and distinctive taste.

How Lye Turns Dough into a Pretzel
After our dough is shaped into pretzels, croissants, or rolls, it’s dipped into a traditional lye solution. This step creates the essential characteristics of a great pretzel:

Golden-Brown Crust: Lye gives pretzels their deep, glossy color that’s impossible to achieve with standard bread-making techniques.
Crunchy Exterior: Lye forms a slight crust on the outside, while keeping the inside soft and chewy—an irresistible contrast.

Landert.us

Home cooks (like me!) typically don’t have lye lying around. We DO have baking soda. And that’s what we use to make the super-simple Easy Pretzel Bites we’re having on Sunday. It’s a fun thing to do with the kiddos too: try a science experiment. Bathe most of the pretzel bites (which are made out store bought biscuit dough) in the baking soda solution, and pop a couple plain janes on the baking sheet next to them for contrast.

Soft pretzel bites on a silver platter with honey mustard and horsradish dipping sauce in white bowls

The baking soda bath changes the appearance and the taste, so a taste test each way is almost a requirement. With some honey mustard and some horseradish dip. You might want to get TWO tubes of biscuit dough. Just saying. I don’t know how many people you’ve got eating.

WEEKLY MENU 04.26.26

What else made the prezel cut for the Weekly Menu 04.26.26? I call them “Pretzel Toffee Bars”, although classically, they’re called “Pretzel Toffee Crack”, a name I find… distasteful. Ours have 4 ingredients, and they use about half a bag of pretzels, which we definitely have sitting around. I like to use minis, but the square ones work well too. We love the little round balls for homemade snack mixes, but I don’t think they’d work.

I might well buy some pretzel buns at the grocery store for our grilled chicken sandwiches. It’ll depend on the squeeze test. They can’t be too hard, or they’ll rip the hell out of the roofs of our mouths. Not ideal.

Mississippi Seasoning hops in to save the day

Do you say M-I-S-S-I-S-S-IP-P-I in your head or out loud when you write that word? I’m old school, so it stays in my head. Mostly.

We’re subbing in pork chops on Monday (because we have a slew of them in the freezer) with the typical Mississippi seasonings we use on beef. It’s a packet of ranch seasoning and a packet of “au Jus” sprinkled on top of all the food in the crockpot. Baby potatoes are cut in half, tossed into the pot, then the pork chops, then some fresh green beans, and then the seasoning packets and 4 tablespoons of butter. Pork chops cook way faster than beef, so this will cook on high for about 4 hours or low for about 6 hours.

We’ve got an Instagram recipe going for Wednesday – 5 ingredients that marry happily. Sausage Stuffed Manicotti uses manicotti shells, chicken or turkey sausage, alfredo sauce, pasta sauce, and a nice spread of mozzarella cheese, all bundled together and baked. It’s chef’s kiss, although it is a LOT of processed food. Moderation in all things, right? We’ve had it before, and it is INSANE.