Martinsbrezel

Martinsbrezel is November bread, the sweet St. Martin's Day pretzel for 11 November, strongest around the Rhineland, the Lower Rhine, the Ruhr, and Westphalia. Children come back from lantern processions with sugar on their fingers, and the baker has done the sensible thing: milk, butter, egg, yeast, and a shape a child can recognize in the dark.

The regions do not agree, good. In some towns the feast gives you a Martinsbrezel with Hagelzucker, coarse pearl sugar; in others it gives you a Weckmann or Stutenkerl, a little bread man. Farther south the day often points toward Martinsgans, St. Martin's goose, and the pretzel in the bakery case may mean a salty Laugenbrezel. Im Norden anders, im Süden anders. This one is not lye-dipped. The feast, not lye, marks it.

The technique that decides it is resting the dough before you roll and again after you shape. A butter-and-milk dough is tender, but freshly kneaded gluten pulls back like a bad-tempered spring; give it ten minutes and the strands stretch long enough to braid without tearing. Then proof the shaped pretzels until puffy, because the braid needs that second rise to bake open instead of tight.

Brush with egg after the second rise, not before. The wash gives colour and holds the sugar, but a wet brush on dough that still needs to grow only drags the surface. Das braucht seine Zeit, and not much more than that.