You may or may not know that I received possibly the best Christmas present of all time. A KitchenAid mixer. I've wanted one for ages but they're pretty expensive so I had accepted that it would need to wait for my wedding registry. And in recent years I accepted that there may never be an aforementioned wedding registry.
But Emily, her mom and her stepdad got me one for Christmas and now there is a whole new world of recipes available to me. I mean sure, I never let the fact that a recipe called for a stand mixer specifically stop me before, but that method led to...mixed results. (Get it?) Most recently I attempted a shortbread. I didn't let the lack of a proper stand mixer deter me because there were only 4 ingredients and 3 of them were butter so it was a low-stakes gamble. The result was almost good enough to eat!
Luckily, those days are behind me now. With my KitchenAid mixer I feel like I can do anything. When I opened the present I wanted to use it right away. But I was at Emily's mom's house so I didn't have access to my baking ingredients. So I settled for Googling KitchenAid mixer recipes and daydreaming. I read some of the more mouthwatering titles and Meg said that she probably had the ingredients for pretzels. Game on!
I am obsessed with those big soft pretzels. I've tried some make your own pretzel kits before but they never really worked. They made something that was pretzel shaped and edible but nothing to write home about. Surely the only problem was not using a stand mixer. That was the missing ingredient. Now that I had my KitchenAid the pretzels would be delicious. I could open up my own Auntie Rae's, gain a cult following, franchise it and make my first million. Easy peasy pretzel squeezy.
Here is the recipe I used.
Before starting we had to make sure that we had all of the necessary ingredients. Yeast? Check. Flour? Check. Butter? Check. Dark brown sugar? Nope. Light brown sugar should be fine, right? Food-grade lye? Definitely not. But I could substitute baked baking soda. Wait...baked baking soda? I'll worry about that later.
The first step was to mix the yeast in warm water. Easy enough, right? That's where Emily's stepdad Jeff comes in. I am turning on the faucet and waiting for the water to warm up when he sticks a thermometer into the stream of water and insists it must be 110 degrees EXACTLY or it will kill the yeast. I know that baking can be an exact science occasionally but I have never in my life waited for an oven to preheat so we were approaching this from very different perspectives. After a few attempts of getting the water hot enough and then maintaining the proper temperature once in the bowl, he gave up. Said it can't be done. He was so angry he literally threw his hands up and was like you guys try and walked away. It was hilarious. Meg immediately got the water to 112 degrees and poured it into the metal bowl which cooled it to 110.
And with that it became clear that this recipe was my Vietnam. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into until I was in the thick of it. But by then it was too late to turn back, we were in too deep. We had only completed the first step and I was already way out of my league. Measuring exact temperatures? Give me a break. But the yeast had been activated. There was no deactivation option. There was no way out but through.
Now I had to add in the other ingredients. I decided to take out the pilsner because I don't like beer, I don't need beer-flavored pretzels just normal pretzel-flavored pretzels. This left the dough very dry because fun fact...the beer is actually important for that pretzel taste we all know and love. Beer is an integral part of pretzel-flavored pretzels. There was no pilsner so we subbed in a lager and moved on. Now before the dough could be considered ready, I had to check off a laundry list of adjectives. Was it firm? Could it form a ball? Was it tacky, but not sticky?
Once my dough could jump through all those hoops it needed to rest in a bowl with a towel on top. And then you had to roll the dough out into pretzel snakes. And let those rest on a pan with a towel on top. And then you could finally form it into a pretzel shape before you...let it rest again with a towel on top. Lot of union breaks in the pretzel world. The Teamsters have nothing on these guys.
After like 4 hours of this nonsense they can finally go in the oven. But now you have to prepare the soak that you are going to dip them in when they're done baking. This is where we bake the baking soda. Then you take your baked baking soda and dissolve it in some boiling water. Which you will need to stir constantly until you are done dipping each pretzel for like 20 seconds.
If you are going to attempt to make your own pretzels I would recommend having at least 5 people on hand to help. And that's a LOW estimate. There are a lot of steps that need to be done essentially at the same exact time and without Emily and Meg and for one brief shining moment Jeff, I never could have done this. It really takes a village.
I was so anxious while they baked. How would they turn out? There were so many ingredient substitutions, so many timing errors. I decided that if the end result bore even a passing resemblance to a pretzel I would consider it a success. After what felt like a solid 12 hours but in reality was only like 6 hours, the pretzels were done. They looked like pretzels. They smelled like pretzels. Could they really be pretzels? Did I just waste half of my waking hours on flavorless dough? Actually, that doesn't sound too bad, never met a carb I didn't like.
After everything was soaked and salted and cooled off, I finally bit into what I can only describe as a pretzel-adjacent bread. For all intents and purposes, I had just baked a pretzel. I am now taking requests for my next baking adventure. Souffles? A Bearnaise? Perhaps some macarons? I might even audition for The Great British Bake Off. The world is my bakery.
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