Soft pretzels...I've never met anyone who didn't like them. And I'll try any (well, almost any) recipe that doesn't require a special trip to the grocery store. I had planned on making these earlier this week, but it didn't happen. I was drawn to this recipe because it claimed to be fast and easy and not require a baking soda bath. I learned from my pretzel bowl adventure that baking soda baths often cause pretzels to lose their shape so I didn't really want to do that again.
I started out with yeast, water, sugar, and salt.
Then I added the flour, and with 3 cups it looked like this:
I added about another 3/4 cup of flour to make the dough less sticky. It was very difficult to stir in with just a wooden spoon. The recipe specified using a spoon instead of a mixer, I don't know why. Eventually I gave up and just tried to mix the rest of the flour in by hand.
After kneading the dough, it looked like this:
I decided to try to make 8 pretzels. Shaping them was a bit harder than I expected, but not that hard.
You can tell I got better at shaping them as I went along.
Instead of dunking each pretzel in the egg wash, I decided to just brush them with egg. I didn't have coarse salt, so I just sprinkled on regular table salt. It was a bit hard to tell how much I had gotten on each one and I didn't want to over salt them-I feel like they ended up a bit under salted but oh well.
After baking and going under the broiler, they looked like this:
They puffed up a ton! The picture doesn't show it that well, but they are super fluffy. Are they as good as the ones you get at the mall or baseball games? No. But they're pretty good for how quickly they come together. They're more bready, and it could be because I didn't do the baking soda bath. That's what creates the more....crusty? exterior we're used to. Anyway, I'll probably hang onto the recipe, Husband thought I should and they're really not terrible. But I wouldn't call them a replacement for Auntie Annie's either. I'll give them 3 stars.
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