Pretzels, Schwabische-Style

How about some warm, fresh pretzels, hot out of the oven with butter melting on them? Warm and soft and crunchy and salty all at the same time. How can you say no?

All it takes is about an hour and you could have some sitting on your kitchen table!

This recipe is for the kind of pretzels that my grandmother would get from the baker in her small German town in Bavaria. Down there a lot of the people speak a dialect of German called Schwabische, and so I call these pretzels Schwabische-style.

Und So, Gangewirloss! (Gehen Wir Loss for those of you who don’t get down to the Schwaben style of things)

Pretzel Recipe

Ingredients for Pretzel Dough:

• Yeast – 2 Tbs
• Warm water – 1.5 Cups
• Baking Powder – 2 Tbs
• Flour – 3.5 Cups
• Table Salt – 1 tsp
• Corn (or other) Oil – 3 Tbs
• Milk or Cream – to brush on before baking
• Kosher Salt or Pretzel Salt – Enough to sprinkle on formed pretzels

Ingredients for Water Bath:

• Water – about 6 Cups
• Baking Soda – about 1/2 cup

How You Make Your Pretzels:

1. Start by putting a large pot filled with about 6 cups of water on the stove on as-high-as-is-humanly-possible setting. Sprinkle in the baking soda. Now you can make your dough.
2. Combine the yeast and warm water for about 5 minutes to proof the yeast. (I put it in the mixing bowl of my KitchenAid mixer that is strong enough to mix concrete)
3. Add flour and baking powder and salt into the bowl and turn on the mixer – beat the heck out of it for about 8-10 minutes. (this is why using the mixer is good, unless you have a ton of aggression to work out).
4. The baking powder is a short cut ingredient so you don’t have to let the dough rise before baking and works great anytime you need to make bread and don’t have time to let it rise.
5. Now pour on the corn (or other) oil, form it into a ball, set back into the mixing bowl, cover with the damp towel you just washed your hands with while you were rinsing off the gooey dough from your fingers, and set the dough aside.
6. Get out your baking pans and line them with parchment paper (this is the secret ingredient that allows the pretzels to be crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside).
7. Turn on your oven and set the temperature to 400 degrees F.
8. Is your pot of water and baking soda boiling? If so, you are ready to get to forming pretzels!
9. Go back to your dough. Pull off a chuck of about 2-3 oz (you can measure this or just pull off the size of about 2 large eggs which is about the same thing).
10. Squeeze and roll the dough between your hands until it is a long wad about the length of two hot dogs (end to end). It works out best if the middle of the dough wad is a bit thicker than the ends.
11. Now set the wad of dough on a mat or clean surface and twist it to make the pretzel shape (it is basically a circle of dough with extra long ends that you twist once around each other and then fold/flip up to connect the ends back with the circle.) If that made absolutely no sense, which is likely, just look up pretzel shapes. The only hint here is to press the ends of the cross piece firmly into the circle part of the pretzel so that they don’t come apart while in the water bath.
12. OK once you have these made (I do about 4 at a time), put them into the boiling water/baking soda for about 1 minute on a side (you need to turn them halfway through).
13. Then take them out of the water bath with a ladle that has holes to drain the water off, and set them on the parchment paper-covered pans.
14. Use a pastry brush to brush them with a bit of milk or cream and then sprinkle with the kosher or pretzel salt.
15. Into the oven they go until the are the color of the ones in the picture. This is usually about 15-20 minutes.

Now all that is left is to get some butter and a plate and eat!

Note: yes, I did in fact misspell Schwabische in the picture above, but since it really is more of a spoken dialect than anything anyone writes I figured I could be lazy and just leave it.

Do you have any special tasty treats you like to bake as well?

Interested in more delicious recipes? check out my friend Annette’s linkup