For me, Superbowl weekend is all about food, friends, and commercials. I could care less about football, and especially so this year, since the game was awful. This game bored me more that football normally does. Seriously. Luckily, my lovely hubby saved the day by deciding that he wanted to try to make homemade pretzels. It was a random idea and it turned out to be amazing one. The game may have sucked, but I was consoled by the delicious food. Yum.
So I thought I'd share the recipe with you fine people.
Let me just start out by saying that this is not my recipe. I found it here at Sally's Baking Addiction.
We didn't quite follow her recipe though. I can't seem to stick to a recipe 100% in anything I make. It stifles my creativity or something.
We made two different batches, since one of our friends is gluten free. The first batch we made with regular all purpose flour, the second was with King Arthur all purpose gluten free flour.
The process is pretty simple. The dough is a basic bread dough with flour, water, salt, and yeast. You don't need to let it rise or anything, just roll it out and bake it.
I usually mix dough with my kitchenaid, but Robert wanted to do this old school and mix by hand. It didn't really take much kneading, so this wasn't a bad choice.
And so we have a nice little lump of dough to work with.
We cut it into pieces, rolled it out,
and shaped it into pretzels (some recipes recommend you to dunk these in a solution of baking soda and boiling water at this point to get them to brown up nicely, but due to laziness, we just cooked them on broil for a few minutes to get the brownness). We brushed on some butter, sprinkled on some course ground sea salt,
and then we baked them. And devoured them. Seriously these were amazing.
This was our gluten free batch, which didn't puff up quite as well and refused to brown, but still tasted quite good. I know nothing about gluten free baking, so I just used the same recipe with different flour, but I'm pretty sure that you have to use something extra to get them to rise. That said, I'd eat these just as they were, and the friend we made them for like them, so I guess that's what counts.
And there you have it: homemade pretzels!
After all that work baking (not really, they were actually super easy) we were too lazy to make any sort of sauce for them. Luckily for us, the pre-made cheese (or cheese-like) sauce that you can get at the grocery store was a perfect pairing. You could also do mustard, or just enjoy the pretzels for the buttery goodness that they offer. Either way.
If you aren't like me and you actually like the structure of a recipe, you can find it here. Or maybe my loose descriptions are good enough.
Either way, give it a try and let me know how they turn out!