Cooking From Scratch: Pretzels

Tonight I realized that almost 1/4 of the year is already gone! Where does time go? Sadly, I waste a lot of time doing nothing, but this weekend I was a little more productive. I've been cleaning, listening/watching a concert with Ray Davies from the Kinks and doing a little cooking.

Since I've been trying to spend less money and not make as many shopping trips I've been doing a lot of random cooking, but slowly that random cooking is turning into cooking from scratch. I've also been frequenting the blog Smitten Kitchen. This lady is one of my cooking idols. She makes cooking look so easy and she has an amazing talent at taking pics of food that look like they came straight out of Gourmet magazine.

A couple of her posts were about pretzels. I thought back to the times I've had cravings for soft pretzels with pizza sauce or a sweet dip. Instantly I was having another of those cravings and I knew I should make these pretzels. Here's the recipe!

The only problem: it involved yeast and I have a fear of yeast. My first attempt at bread making ended with a brick of bread and I blame the yeast, or at least my lack of knowledge on how to handle yeast. This time I figured I'd
give this a try and if it failed I'd stop trying to use yeast.
I also failed to read the recipe fully before I started. Let's just say, I had NO idea that
pretzels involved steps that seemed like something out of science lab!
Making the pretzel shape wasn't too hard...
but when it came to boiling the pretzels in water and baking soda, I was a little suprised...

but I guess it was all worth it in the end.

I put too much flour in the dough and that made it difficult to roll the dough into long strands. The boiling also cause a few problems because some of them didn't hold the pretzel shape, but I reshaped them when I pulled them out of the water. I shaped some of the dough into little balls and insead of salt, I put decorating sugar. Those ones turned out the best...not too much pretzel and the sugar made them even better.

Overall, this took me about 2 hours but it was worth it and I didn't even noticed it took that long because each step took only a few minutes, then I'd go do something else while I waited for the next step. I'll be making these again, and next time making some great sauces to go with them, maybe for a party!

2 comments:

Sophia said...

What are you talking about they look GREAT!

Tasha said...

Thanks! You really should try these. They're so much easier than I had anticipated.

I'm a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and became a bohemian.

~Brigitte Bardot

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