Once upon a time, there was a 16-year-old girl who worked at Pretzelmaker at the mall. That girl made A LOT of soft pretzels. That girl ate A LOT of soft pretzels. That girl was me.
I can still remember rolling those strands out, slapping them on the counter and twisting them up into the perfect pretzel knot. However, when I made these, I could not actually remember how to do it. A quick search of YouTube brought up tons of how-to videos and after a few tries, my hands quickly remembered what to do.
The dough comes together in a stand mixer to make these super-easy to make; you can definitely do this by hand if you don’t have a stand mixer! A few rests and rises, a quick YouTube video to see how to shape them, and a dip in baking soda and water to give your pretzels that classic mahogany-brown color, and you’re on your way to homemade pretzels. A couple tips from my own baking experiences:
- Make sure to line your baking sheets with parchment and spray with nonstick spray-or these will stick like no other!
- Only work with one pan and three pretzels at a time when dipping in the baking soda-water solution and baking
- I found that the pretzels baked on the bottom rack of the oven had a tendency to burn if I baked two at a time, so make sure to follow the instructions and bake one sheet at a time in the center of the oven.
- If you bake one sheet at a time, but dip/prepare all of the pretzels at the same time, the ones that sit and wait to be baked will be very dark-almost burnt-because the baking soda solution has sat on them longer and penetrated the dough.
- Don’t undersalt the pretzels!!!! I used King Arthur Flour Pretzel Salt and sprinkled very generously!
Everyone loves a soft pretzel, right? If you don’t, shoot me a comment and explain whyyyyyy. Please, I must know what could drive someone to dislike these bready brown beauties. Especially when there’s so many delicious things with which to flavor them, coat them or dip them in. Not that there’s anything wrong with some basic nacho cheese from a can…
But we’re better than that. Later this week, we’ll be making some beer cheese soup to dip these in. I got the idea from Pinch of Yum and quickly set out to make the perfect beer cheese soup.
Football season is coming up soon and the beer cheese soup-pretzel combo would be the most perfect complement to when your favorite team has an away game and you have a big group of people to feed. But you don’t have to wait to make these…soft pretzels are surprisingly easy to make!
[tasty-recipe id=”31804″]
Comments