I love a warm, soft pretzel, and I was super excited to make my own! As usual, I started with the mise en place for the dough.
I mixed the ingredients together on my KitchenAid mixer on the “stir” setting for 3 minutes, then on speed 4 for 5 minutes, then set the dough aside to rest.
After an hour the dough had risen, so I divided it into 12 pieces and roughly preshaped each piece into a log.
Then I shaped each piece into a pretzel. First I rolled each log into a long snake, about 2 feet long. Then I twisted the ends around each other twice. I brought the ends down to the base of the pretzel body and smushed them into place. Finally, I shimmied the pretzels into a nice shape and placed them on a pan to rise.
The pretzels were visibly puffy after 40 minutes. I boiled water and baking soda for the water bath.
I boiled each pretzel individually for 10 seconds on each side. It was a little tricky to get the pretzels into the water without deflating them, distorting the shape, or sticking to them.
After a few minutes all 12 pretzels had been boiled. I sprinkled them with salt and put them in the oven.
I baked the pretzels for 22 minutes, which was the maximum recommended baking time. I rotated the baking pans throughout the bake to get even colour on the pretzels. The pretzels baked to a deep golden colour, as specified in the directions, but not to a darker brown as shown in the picture and as is typically seen on pretzels.
The last step before we could eat a pretzel was to brush them with butter.
The pretzels are delicious. They have a buttery flavor (not surprising, since they were brushed with butter after baking). They taste pretzelly, but not super pretzelly. Commercial pretzel bakers boil the pretzels in a lye solution, which is more caustic than the baking soda solution I used. This impacts both the flavor and the colour of the pretzels. I have read that you can bake baking soda to change it into Carbonate of Soda (rather than Bicarbonate of Soda), which is more caustic than baking soda, but less caustic than lye, so I’d like to try either that or a lye bath next time. I also wonder how much deeper the colour would have gotten if I had left the pretzels in the oven for 25 minutes. Would they have been over-baked at that point? Clearly more experimentation is needed.
Until the next time: may your yeast always rise and your flour never run out
A Baker's Education 