People most certainly don't eat sodium hydroxide on their pretzels anymore than they eat raw egg in their cakes. Coating pretzels with lye before baking causes a chemical reaction that consumes the lye. You really, really shouldn't ingest any amount of lye, lest it react with the inside of your squishy organic matter like the surface of pretzel dough...

Sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is lye, which shouldn't be consumed. Pretzel salt is sodium chloride (NaCL).

In German, I think their full name is Laugenbrezel. The full name may not be much used[1] colloquially, because it's implied -- but bread rolls made the same way are definitely called Laugenbrötchen.

"Lauge" is German for "lye". They're called that because they're made with it.

[1]: Though when I switched my phone keyboard to German just now to test it out, the predictive spelling corrector suggested "Laugenbrezel", not "-brötchen", when I'd got as far as "Laugenb".

Nope, pretzels are made with lye (NaOH). That's how you get the tasty brown Maillard reaction coating - boil the dough in lye water, then bake, then salt it.

Though it doesn't have to be lye - you can use other less caustic bases, such as baking soda.

Some traditional pretzel/bagel recipes use lye: https://www.bakespace.com/recipes/detail/Soft-Pretzels-using...

Lye is used in the creation of pretzels and bagels.