Test Kitchen #28: Soft Baked Pretzels

After last week's foray into bread making, a little brainstorming lead us to google in search of a pretzel recipe. Dad loves pretzels and I'm huge fan of all snacks salty, so I was really excited about this one. I was also relieved to find that after spending 4.5 hours baking Challah last week, the pretzel recipe we found was only going to take about 2.5.


In the interest of brevity, I'll get to the highlights and so you can spend more time drooling over the pictures.

Verdict: AWESOME and so much fun! If you like warm, soft baked pretzels, I highly recommend you try this recipe. The recipe makes 12 pretzels, but we doubled it to make 24. If you've never done this before, I'd go with more because you'll need the practice when it comes to rolling out and forming the pretzel shapes. The biggest challenge is boiling the formed pretzel doughs just before baking. Although only in the water for a minute each, they tend to get a little slippery when you're trying to get them out.

We made three different kinds: Traditional kosher salt, sprinkled Parmesan cheese and a few with a dusting of cinnamon sugar. The cheese on the pretzels came out great and fused the little holes together making a pretzel roll. After they were all done, we picked the biggest ones, sliced them on the horizontal and made a couple of turkey club sandwiches for our lunch.


Only one low point: The oven temp was way to high for the cinnamon sugar pretzels and, though they smelled delicious, the sugar caramelized leaving very little flavor behind. Dad suggested that next time we try baking them plain, painting them with a thin glaze and dusting them with the cinnamon after they come out of the oven.

We will definitely make these again. As with most baked goods, they're served best hot and fresh out of the oven, but if you have some left over, a quick nuking or short stay in the toaster will bring them back to life. I also learned the hard way to not store them in plastic bags, particularly when they're still warm. They start to sweat in the bag and can get a little soggy.