Laugenstangerl

Every morning in Salzburg, the bakeries fill their windows with Laugenstangerl before the city is properly awake. Not twisted pretzels. Sticks. Glossy, dark, scored down the middle, with coarse salt crystals catching the light. That's the Austrian shape. When tourists ask me why my restaurant serves sticks instead of twists, I tell them: because this is Austria, not Bavaria. The Stangerl is ours.

I fell in love with Laugengebäck on those childhood trips with Gretel and my grandmother Eva. We'd stop at a bakery on the way to the Grünmarkt and Gretel would buy a bag of Stangerl still warm from the oven. She'd tear one open right there on the pavement and show me the inside: soft, slightly chewy, with that particular milky sweetness that only lye-dipped bread has. The crust would shatter into dark, salty flakes. I thought it was the most perfect thing in the world. I still do.

The trick to Laugenstangerl is the lye bath. It's what gives them that impossible mahogany color and the flavor you can't get any other way. At home, you have two choices: food-grade lye, which is what every bakery uses and gives you the real thing, or a baking soda bath, which gets you close but not all the way there. I'll walk you through both. Either way, the dough itself is simple. Flour, milk, butter, yeast, salt. You can have these shaped and in the oven in under two hours, and your kitchen will smell like a Salzburg Bäckerei.