Rye Pretzels

[Onions]

Lately, every chance I get, I have been working whole grains into the meals we serve our sons, Dexter and Elliot. The cabinets and the freezer are stockpiled with farro, oatmeal, wild rice, polenta and bags of not-white flour: whole wheat, spelt and buckwheat. The change in our diet is most noticeable on Saturday and Sunday mornings, when Dexter and I usually make pancakes or waffles. Just six months ago, we were following a white-flour-dominated recipe that either one of my grandmothers would have recognized. Our most recent batch of pancakes incorporated whole-grain rye flour and cornmeal along with half a cup of cooked quinoa. If my goal was to transport my sons back to the kitchen of some Nixon-era communally owned radical-feminist vegetarian tea parlor without anybody figuring out that we had left 2010 Brooklyn, then the pancakes were a wild success.



The grain revolution has come to snack time too. Last weekend, as usual, Dexter was agitating to make cookies or cupcakes or lollipops or chocolates. He took me up on my suggestion of soft pretzels. We had never made them before, and he was so fascinated by the technique — kneading the dough, rolling it out and twisting it into three interlocking loops, then proofing, boiling, salting and, at last, baking them — that he had no idea that the recipe’s first step, when we mixed a cup of whole rye flour into the dough, was at all out of the ordinary.

What I have in common with some of those communally owned Nixon-era restaurants is a kind of blind faith in the healing power of whole grains.

On the subject of nutrition, I probably know as much as most Americans, which is to say, next to nothing. The eat-your-vegetables tone of most dietary advice doesn’t put me off. The troubles begin when I try to learn which vegetables whisk away arterial plaque and which are industrious in the colo­rectal department. Are saturated fats more evil than unsaturated? They sound that way. Are monoglycerides any improvement on diglycerides?

Don’t bother telling me that I can look it up. I have. I can’t keep it straight, because it is all so skull-crushingly dull. The chemicals and nutrients have names as improbable and inseparable as those of the characters in a thousand-page novel about wizards and elves: “After a fortnight, the legions of Omega-3 at last reached the fetid lair of Cholesterol. . . .” No wonder when it comes to my eating habits, magical thinking prevails. All my life I have grafted fistfuls of dimly grasped concepts to a series of barely articulated goals. A result has been one crackpot nutritional theory after another.

It began almost the minute I left my parents’ house and moved to Philadelphia, where I hit on the pretzel diet. In the pretzel diet, you eat a pretzel with mustard for lunch every day, and you can have anything you want for breakfast and dinner. At the time, the city’s street trucks sold delicious, substantial soft pretzels for 25 cents. They were the size of the paperbacks that my history professors assigned and about as filling. You needed only one, and you were set for the day. I always had mine with mustard, which lifted my simple meal to the level of cuisine. But the main advantage of the pretzel diet was that pretzels gave me loads of carbohydrates, which were the foundation of the food pyramid. If you ate enough carbohydrates, supplemented by apples and rounded out every so often by cheese steaks, you would be granted an extraordinarily long and rewarding life. That, at least, was my reading of the U.S.D.A. guidelines in 1984.

There were other diets, too. What they all had in common was a single-minded obsession with one ingredient or nutrient. For a while I drank orange juice with every meal. Then a friend told me that red meat was the devil, so I became a vegetarian. I briefly had the idea that eating carbohydrates by the pound was not as important as rigorously avoiding fat, so I ate steamed fish and vegetables with no sauce.

When I moved to New York, I was still eating pretzels avidly until I made two important discoveries: they cost about eight times as much as the ones in Philadelphia, and they tasted like neckties. I gave up on them and turned to the city’s seemingly limitless varieties of head-turning food. This demanded a new nutritional paradigm. So I put together what seemed like a pretty good one. Here it goes: Foods that taste good are good for you.

Until recently, I was under the sway of this idea, which was based on the notion that our bodies tell us what they need. When we’re thirsty, we drink. When we need iron, we crave steak. When our synapses are frayed and require reinforcement from dietary fats, we go to Momofuku Ssam Bar for pork-belly buns. This theory allowed me to forget about nutrition for years at a stretch.

Every few presidents, I swung by to see my doctor. His message has been steady: Lose weight and cut down on the bad cholesterol. And every few presidents, I dropped a few pounds by cutting out alcohol, the only method that has ever worked. But it’s not a sustainable diet. I like drinking too much. I remained overweight under Democratic or Republican rule and continued to eat too much cheese and not enough sardines.

Then, when Dexter was 4 and Elliot was 1, this whole-grain thing kicked in. Grains are fantastic. White-flour pancakes taste like butter and maple syrup, nothing more, but the feminist-collective quinoa cakes had a depth and richness that put me in mind of strong whiskey. A bowl of Irish oatmeal or, better yet, pinhead oats from Scotland, stirred with buttermilk and nutmeg and chopped apples, can taste like roasted almonds.

I heartily recommend the rye pretzels Dexter and I baked too. The whole rye flour gives them extraordinary character. The difference between the Philadelphia pretzels and these is the difference between my 22-year-old self and the man writing these words, who has two boys now, who eats whole grains, who hopes and hopes that farro and wild rice will scour the pork fat and butter from his heart. Who wants to stay alive.

[Onions]

everywhere

[smackaholic]

Dexter and Elliot?

Why do you hate your sons?

As for fad diets, they all are the suck. I do however like the idea of home made pretzels made out of hippie approved grains. Might have to look into that.

[Goober McTuber]

Where do you CTRL-Cuda your takes from?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/magaz ... t-000.html