Bowl Game Food: Soft Pretzels

This holiday season was so confusing. All the holidays on the weekends, and the Rose Bowl game on the 2^nd. What to make? Well, it felt like we should’ve made chili, but that didn’t happen.

Luckily, there’s almost always white flour in the house. Sorry, Atkins, South Beach, Dukan and Boulder, in general. Can’t seem to make it without gluten.

Been searching for a good Soft Pretzel recipe. I’ve tried several but don’t like butter in the dough. Started with King Arthur but thought it should be boiled like bagels. Anyway, here’s what we came up with. I was pretty happy with it.

Mary

Soft Pretzels

Inspired by King Arthur Flour’s Hot Buttered Pretzels

2 1/2 cups Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons regular instant yeast
1 1/4 cup warm water*
8 cups water
2 tablespoons baking soda
coarse, kosher or pretzel salt
3 tablespoons butter, melted

*Use more water in the winter (or in a dry climate like Colorado), the lesser amount in the summer, and somewhere in between in the spring and fall. Your goal is a soft dough.

Place all of the dough ingredients into the bowl of a stand mixer, and beat till well-combined. Knead the dough, by hand or machine, for about 5 minutes, till it’s soft, smooth, and quite slack. Flour the dough and place it in a bag, and allow it to rest for 30 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 500°F. Prepare two baking sheets by spraying them with vegetable oil spray, or lining them with parchment paper.

Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface, and divide it into eight equal pieces (about 70g, or 2 1/2 ounces, each).

Allow the pieces to rest, uncovered, for 5 minutes. Roll each piece of dough into a long, thin rope (about 28 to 30 inches long), and twist each rope into a pretzel.

Allow them to rest, uncovered, for 10 minutes.

While the dough is resting, bring 8 cups of water plus the baking soda to a boil in a large pot. Make sure the baking soda is thoroughly dissolved; if it isn’t, it’ll make your pretzels splotchy. Gently place 1-2 pretzels at a time in the boiling water for about 1 minute per side to set the dough.

Carefully remove from the pot. A chopstick works well to turn the pretzels, but a spatula works best to remove from the water.

Brush the pretzels with the melted butter. Sprinkle them lightly with pretzel salt (you can use kosher, but the pretzel salt really does make a BIG difference.) Keep brushing the butter on until you’ve used it all up; it may seem like a lot, but that’s what gives these pretzels their ethereal taste. Bake the pretzels for 8 to 12 minutes, or until they’re golden brown, reversing the baking sheets halfway through.

Eat the pretzels warm, or reheat them in an oven or microwave. Yield: 8 pretzels.