A Classic Housewife in a Modern World

Last week, the kids and I made some impromptu, homemade soft pretzels – and they were wonderfully delicious!

See:

This is just a chronicling of our first attempt to make soft pretzels – which was a complete success, by the way! The complete recipe and instructions can be found here, at Mommy of Four.

Also, we experimented with a small group of them, adding sugar and cinnamon. The effect was similar to cinnamon rolls or cinnamon toast but in pretzel form.

The rest we ate with parmesan cheese. The kids loved them. The next morning we had leftover pretzels with our breakfast, warmed in the toaster, split open and spread with butter or cream cheese. YUM!

Here’s a few tips from our experience:

1. It took a few tries to get the hang of rolling them out thin and long enough.
2. I learned that it was actually harder to roll them out thin enough if there was too much flour on the table, they slipped instead of rolling.
3. We gave the 2yo one ball of dough to roll, squash and re-roll. So we actually made 23 instead of 24. But the ONE kept him from messing with the other 23!
4. During the “bathing” process, I used two plates. One to transfer the wet pretzels to the table, one to transfer new pretzels to the bath. I could reload the dry plate while the previous batch simmered and pick it up after dropping off the wet pretzels. It kept things flowing smoothly.
5. My pretzels didn’t actually need to bake as long as the recipe indicated. The first 8 almost burned! After that, I set the timer for 8 minutes and checked them every minute or two.

Edited to add: I wasn’t sure which flour to use so I used half bread flour and half all purpose flour, I also some wheat gluten.

Wanna learn more about making pretzels? Let Alton Brown show you how. (Of course, he doesn’t use a bread machine, but he’ll teach you why the baking soda bath is important.)

• Part 1
• Part 2

Have fun making your own homemade pretzels!