Soft Pretzels

Salty Sweet Pretzels

So this was our first time making these soft pretzels and they were a success!! This recipe makes 8 soft pretzels. We made 4 salty pretzels and 4 with cinnamon and sugar pretzels. We recommend both, they are so yummy! Auntie Anne's better watch out! Unfortunately we do not have one of those really nice food mixers (one day...) so mixing the dough was a little difficult and messy (I used my clean hands!). Michael also got a new camera, the Canon T2i so now our food pictures will look amazingly better! Only this blog entry has no picture, but a video! Does anyone have a preference, pictures or video? I like the pictures better, Michael likes the video.

Ingredients

- 1 1/2 cups of warm water
-1 tablespoon of honey
-2 teaspoons of kosher salt
-1 package of active dry yeast
-4 cups of flour (we did half all purpose and half wheat flour)
-2 ounces of unsalted, melted butter
-vegetable oil (for the pan)
-10 cups of water
-2/3 cups of baking soda
-1 egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon of water
-pretzel salt (we just used regular sea salt)

Mix the warm water, honey, and dry yeast together. Let the mixture sit for about 5 minutes or until the mixture looks foamy. Add in the salt after the mix has become foamy.

Next add in the flour and melted butter. Mix the ingredients together using a mixer (I wish) or your clean hands (what we did) . Put the dough in a different greased bowl. You can use the vegetable oil to coat the bowl or just use cooking spray (which is what we did). Place a damp cloth or a paper towel over the bowl and let it sit for an hour.

After an hour the dough should be double in size. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper and grease the parchment paper. In a large pot bring the 10 cups of water and baking soda to a boil.

In the meantime, knead the dough on a slightly oil surface. Divide the dough into 8 equal pieces. Roll each piece of dough out like a long rope (about 24 inches long). Make a U shape with the dough, take each end piece of the dough and cross them over each other and press them at the bottom of the U shape to make the classic pretzel look.

Place the pretzels into the boiling water 1 by 1 for 30 seconds each. Remove the pretzels from the boiling water using a large spatula. Place the pretzels onto the greased baking sheets.

Brush the top of each pretzel with the beaten egg yolk and water mixture. Sprinkle on any topping you want to the pretzels, we did half sea salt and half cinnamon and sugar.

Put both baking sheets in the oven for 6 minutes then switch the top sheet to the bottom and the bottom sheet to the top in the oven. Let that bake for another 6 minutes for a total of 12 minutes or until golden brown.

Enjoy!!

Pretzel Day from Michael Stark on Vimeo.

-Melanie & Michael