Ben's Blog

I was craving soft pretzels for some reason today so I made a batch after getting home from work.  In case you ever get the craving here is our recipe (aside from not looking like your standard pretzel shape they are excellent):

Really Good Soft Pretzels

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon yeast
• 1 table spoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup warm water
• 2 3/4 cups flour
• 4 cups water, boiling (for water bath)
• 4 teaspoons baking soda (for water bath)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 475 degrees
2. Mix butter, yeast, sugar, salt, hot water, and 1 cup of flour until smooth & bubbles form
3. Gradually mix in remaining flour until dough is no longer sticky, add additional flour if necessary.
4. Cover dough and allow to rise until it doubles in size (and hour or 2)
5. Once dough has risen knead for 1-2 minutes, adding a bit of flour to make dough less sticky if need be
6. Divide dough and roll out pieces of dough until strips are 1/2″ in diameter and long enough to form your pretzel shapes
7. Let shaped pretzels sit for 2-3 minutes
8. Drop pretzels into boiling water bath (4 cups of water and 4 teaspoons of baking soda, boiling) and let float for 1 minutes on each side
9. Let pretzels drip dry on a wire rack and then transfer to a greased cookie sheet
10. Cook for 13-15 minutes, or until pretzels reach desired brown-ness.

Once you start cutting the dough and shaping the pretzels it is helpful to have two people to keep the process going.  The pretzels will start to accumulate on greased cookie sheets after the water bath and then you’ll just have to wait for everything to bake.  To speed things up I usually skip the shaping step and just cut into 2 inch chunks which are great for dipping in something like a spicy or honey mustard sauce.  Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010, 9:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.