Using a kitchen scale, I weighed a pot with 2,200 grams of water (a bit more than a half-gallon) and determined I needed about 3 grams of lye, which amounted to a small pinch. Graf told me in an email to weigh the water and the lye so the chemical accounted for 0.15 percent of the solution. The next morning, I drank a cup of coffee and put on my safety gear. My friend had gone through a pretzel-making phase and had hoped to experiment with boiling in lye, but never had the guts to open the bottle labeled in red: “Poison: Causes Severe Burns.” By coincidence, I had dinner days later with a friend who had an unopened bottle in his closet. “It’s the tragedy of the food commons,” he said, referring to the simplification of home recipes. Here I was trying to perfect the bagel and working with a G-rated version of his recipe. (A Times reporter revised his recipe in 2012 to include baking soda, a common alternative to lye.) “It’s really caustic.” So his home recipe instructs the baker to boil the bagels in salted water. “There is that liability there of, like, ‘Oh, don’t poison yourself,’” Mr.
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