Sourdough Discard Pretzel Bites & Beer Cheese Dip

Long time readers may know that The Hubs and I played trivia weekly at a bar downtown for about 6 years before Lil' Man was born.  We seek out pub quiz and trivia nights at breweries when we travel.  A few months ago, we started up a new team with some of our HomeBrew Zoo friends for a bi-monthly trivia night at a local brewery that doesn't have onsite food.  One night, we saw another group bring in a cake and some snacks for a party, and it occurred to us...why don't we just bring food and eat here?  And thus, Trivia Potluck was born.  

Crockpot in a Brewery...not the weirdest thing you've ever seen.

Recently, The Hubs was craving cheese dip, so I decided to make some sourdough pretzel bites to go with it, using this discard recipe from Pantry Mama.  I stayed true to recipe so if you're interested in making the pretzel bites, just click on that link.  But if you're interested in our cheese dip recipe, it's below!

Note: I accidentally doubled the amount of salt in the pretzel bites recipe...flavor was fine, but I think it impeded fermentation a bit. I would also recommend using warm water to let the yeast bloom for a little while before adding everything else in.

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 lb brick of lower sodium Velveeta-type melting cheese
• 1 lb spicy italian sausage, browned & drained
• 14 oz can of low sodium Rotel tomato-chiles blend (DO NOT DRAIN)
• 1 Tbsp taco seasoning
• 1/2 cup homebrew or other beer (we used a pilsner)

DIRECTIONS;

1. Brown sausage, drain, and set aside.
2. Cube up the melting cheese, place in a small crockpot, and add the Rotel & taco seasoning.  Let melt/blend for 2 hours on Low, or 1 hour on High, stirring frequently.
3. Once it starts to melt & come together, add the sausage and beer, and stir.  
4. Serve warm with chips, pretzel bites, whatever else you feel like dunking in delicious cheese...and of course, with lots of friends!

I only put Everything Bagel seasoning on part of them, since I wasn't sure if it would clash with the cheese dip.

Good times with great friends!

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.