Sourdough Stories 17: Homemade Soft Pretzels

 I have a long-standing love of soft pretzels. Typically of the Auntie Anne's variety.   When I worked in the mall in college (RIP KB Toys), they were my default lunch choice.  When I have to fly for work, I get really bummed if there isn't an Auntie Anne's in my terminal near my gate.  When I worked at Miner Mike's in high school, I ate a soft pretzel w/cheese sauce on my lunch break on average 3 out of 5 days a week (the other options being pizza slices or grilled cheese, which also took longer to make...and when you only get 30 minutes for lunch, gotta maximize that time.)  So when The Hubs suggested we make some sourdough soft pretzels, I was 100% here for it.

I followed Little Spoon Farm's recipe to the letter, so you can hop over there to see it.  I used the stand mixer option, which was super easy, and took about 10 minutes of mixing for our dough.  Mixed the dough up in the morning while having my coffee & breakfast, then put the cover on and headed off to work.

Post-kneading, pre-work.

When I got home, the dough was ready to go, beautiful & pliable, but did tend to retract on itself, so it took a while to figure out how much to roll out the dough to get a nice pretzel shape without it shrinking back up on itself.

Top right is the first one I made. Technique generally improved as I worked my way to the left. 

By the time we were ready to pre-boil them (before baking), I was also cooking some brats & onions and green beans, so there was a lot happening. I found it helpful to have The Hubs running a timer on his phone that went off every 30 seconds to remind me when to flip the pretzels and when to pull them out.  (This was utter chaos; thus, no photos.)

The original recipe calls to bake these for 12-14 minutes, but I found them to be pretty pale at that amount of time.  So we let them go for about 18-20 minutes.  Each oven is going to be a bit different so just keep an eye on them.  

Post-boiling, as they went into the oven with the egg wash & salt.

These were delicious on their own, or with some stone ground mustard.  With some slight changes to the portioning, you could easily make these into some really nice pretzel buns, and then serve with brats as a sandwich.