It’s easy to mock the New York street pretzel ? dry as a vacant lot in August, tough as a cockroach.

“I tried one once, and I didn’t want to try it again,” said Lina Kulchinsky, a Russian-born pastry chef who owns Sigmund Pretzel Shop in New York’s East Village.

Soft pretzels, whether old and dry or undercooked and greasy, rarely approach the original German standard.

“Most of them are just pretzelshaped bread,” said Michael Momm, the German owner of Loreley, a beer garden on New York’s Lower East Side. At Loreley, as at other hip Mitteleuropean spots in the city like Zum Schneider, Cafe Katja and Radegast Hall and Biergarten, frozen pretzels are imported from Germany and baked to order.

But Ms. Kulchinsky’s storefront - where the pretzels are yeasty, blistered and fresh - is one of a few places where New Yorkers can now buy a real soft pretzel, mahogany brown on the outside, with plenty of loft and pull. The pretzel dough is freshly mixed and twisted by hand. Flavor and perfume come from a traditional baking method, not from a bath of melted butter.

House-made pretzels (and pretzel rolls) are having a fashionable moment in New York. They are adorning bread baskets at trendy eateries like Per Se and Commerce, and are served on a board with Italian salumi and cheese at Bread Tribeca. At the Redhead, Meg Grace (who specializes in brilliant bar food) makes soft pretzels to serve with a tangy “beer cheese” dip.

There’s a perfect New York hybrid at the Rusty Knot, a Sabrett all-beef hot dog with fresh pretzel dough wound around it, brushed with clarified butter and sprinkled with sea salt.

Sue Torres, a chef who was just brought in to revamp the bar’s menu, said she changed everything except the pretzel dog.

“I had some good ideas,” she said. “I was going to make my own chorizo. But there’s nothing as good as a pretzel and a hot dog.”

Despite street pretzels’ low state, they come from a noble family. In much of Germany and parts of Switzerland and Austria, the pretzel is the symbol of the bread baker’s art, as the baguette is in France (though the pretzel is much older).

Nuremberg is where “the pretzel madness begins,” said Tinka Bickel, a German marketing manager who lives in New York. South of that German city lies a distinct culinary, linguistic and cultural region where pretzels are much more than a desperation- level snack.

Bavaria is part of this region; there, a classic old-school breakfast is a fresh pretzel - about as wide as a dinner plate - served with two weisswurst (veal sausages) and a dollop of sweet mustard on a plate.

But now, Ms. Bickel said, young people in Munich, Bavaria’s capital, just grab a thickly buttered pretzel with coffee on the way to work.

“It’s like Starbucks,” she said. “There are pretzel chains in every neighborhood.”

In Baden-Wurttemberg, in southwest Germany near France and Switzerland, the pretzels are known for their fat “bellies” and skinny, intertwined arms. That’s the style at Prime Meats in Brooklyn; Frank Castronovo, an owner, learned to make pretzels there.

“The goal is to have two distinct eating experiences, one crunchy and one fluffy, in a single pretzel,” said Jeffrey Hamelman, director of the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center in Norwich, Vermont.

The defining “secret” of pretzels is lye, a powerful alkali that gives them their defining contrast between a creamy white interior and a crunchy, dark-brown, lightly bitter crust. Just before baking, pretzels are dipped into a bath of water and lye, which transforms the starch on the surface so that it can brown quickly, while the interior remains moist. Cold lye solution can burn the eyes or skin, but the chemicals are neutralized by the heat of the oven.

The pretzel rolls at Zingerman’s Bakehouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are made with a bit of lard in the dough, for pliability and mouth feel, said Shelby Kibler, the director of the baking school there. Like many modern bakers, those at Zingerman’s add a bit of malt syrup or malted flour for richer flavor. Then the pretzels are dipped in lye.

“You can’t get that indefinable pretzeliness without lye,” Mr. Kibler said. Baking soda, which is used in many home-baking pretzel recipes, does not have as intense an effect, he said. “Lye is what makes it a pretzel.”

And don’t talk to Germans about hard pretzels, an American creation.

“My colleague this morning ate little crunchy pretzels covered with blueberry and cherry yogurt,” Ms. Bickel said wonderingly. “That would never make sense to a German person.”


By JULIA MOSKIN