Hot Buttered Pretzels
Pretzels are available crisp and hard from your grocery or, if you're lucky and in the right place, soft and chewy from street vendors. Our recipe is for the soft, chewy kind.
Dough
2 1/2 cups King Arthur Unbleached All-Purpose Flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons regular instant yeast
7/8 to 1 cup warm water*
Topping
1/2 cup warm water
2 tablespoons baking soda
coarse, kosher or pretzel salt
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
*Use the greater amount in the winter, the lesser amount in the summer, and somewhere in between in the spring and fall. Your goal is a soft dough.
Food Processor Method: Place the flour, salt, sugar and yeast in the work bowl of a food processor equipped with the steel blade. Process for 5 seconds. Add the water, and process for 7 to 10 seconds, until the dough starts to clear the sides of the bowl. Process a further 45 seconds. Place a handful of flour in a bowl, scoop the slack dough into the bowl, and shape the dough into a ball, coating it with the flour. Transfer the dough to a plastic bag, close the bag loosely, leaving room for the dough to expand, and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.
Bread Machine Method: Place all of the dough ingredients into the pan of your bread machine, program the machine for Dough or Manual, and press Start. Allow the dough to proceed through its two kneading cycles, then cancel the machine, flour the dough, and give it a rest in a plastic bag, as instructed above.
Manual/Mixer Method: Place all of the dough ingredients into a bowl, and beat till well-combined. Knead the dough, by hand or machine, for about 5 minutes, till it's soft, smooth, and quite slack. Flour the dough and place it in a bag, and allow it to rest for 30 minutes.
Preheat your oven to 500°F. Prepare two baking sheets by spraying them with vegetable oil spray, or lining them with parchment paper.
Transfer the dough to a lightly greased work surface, and divide it into eight equal pieces (about 70g, or 2 1/2 ounces, each). Allow the pieces to rest, uncovered, for 5 minutes. While the dough is resting, combine the 1/2 cup warm water and the baking soda, and place it in a shallow bowl. Make sure the baking soda is thoroughly dissolved; if it isn't, it'll make your pretzels splotchy.
Roll each piece of dough into a long, thin rope (about 28 to 30 inches long), and twist each rope into a pretzel, as illustrated. Dip each pretzel in the baking soda wash (this will give the pretzels a nice, golden-brown color), and place them on the baking sheets. Sprinkle them lightly with coarse, kosher, or pretzel salt. Allow them to rest, uncovered, for 10 minutes.
Bake the pretzels for 8 to 9 minutes, or until they're golden brown, reversing the baking sheets halfway through.
Remove the pretzels from the oven, and brush them thoroughly with the melted butter. Keep brushing the butter on until you've used it all up; it may seem like a lot, but that's what gives these pretzels their ethereal taste. Eat the pretzels warm, or reheat them in an oven or microwave. Yield: 8 pretzels.
Nutrition information per serving (1 pretzel, 85g): 171 cal, 4.7g fat, 4g protein, 27g complex carbohydrates, 1g sugar, 1g dietary fiber, 12mg cholesterol, 444mg sodium, 63mg potassium, 43RE vitamin A, 2mg iron, 66mg calcium, 44mg phosphorus.
Reviews
12/26/2008
These are simply outstanding!
05/26/2009
I have made these for a number of years and they never fail to satisfy. Very easy recipe (which I also use for pizza dough ocassionally).
06/03/2009
My 11 year old son loves to bake this recipe. He enjoys eating the pretzels for dessert, as a bread with dinner and for breakfast.
07/08/2009
This is my first use of the recipe index at King Arthur, though I've been a fan of the whole wheat flour for a while, and I was so pleased with the outcome, I thought I should leave a review. While I have been quite successful in making a number of bread varieties, including baguettes, perfect pretzels have eluded me. The whole process usually goes pear-shaped when applying the alkaline solution. The usual method of boiling in baking soda water always seems to deflate and unravel them. This recipe has happily solved that problem. I am constitutionally incapable of following a recipe exactly as written, so I modified, using bread flour instead of all-purpose. I also weighed it, rather than measuring, using the theory that one well-measured cup was 4.25 ounces. It's summer in North Carolina and very humid out, but I figured that the bread flour could take a little more water than all-purpose could, so I used a little over 7 ounces. I also had about 3 ounces of preferment from yesterday's baking and on a whim, I threw that in too. In the end, the dough was a little wetter than I think it should have been because it was not as easier to work with as challah or kaiser roll dough. The shaping resulted in rather homely pretzels, but as promised they were deliciously soft and beautifully golden. The flavor was excellent and more complex than I would have expected, given the recipe. That might have been from the preferment I added. They were extremely chewy, which is how I prefer them. I baked them on a pizza stone with parchment paper, so they only took about 7 minutes to cook. The parchment paper got very brown, though, so I might not do that again. I will probably fiddle with the dough a bit, but this method of making pretzels is the best I have encountered. If you can manage to follow the recipe as directed (silly, curious, meddling me!) prefect, pretty, golden pretzels will almost certainly be yours! They will be delicious in any case, so you might want to double the recipe if you have friends over.
07/15/2009
Very easy to do and the results are fantastic. I have found my favorite pretzel recipe.
10/27/2009
These were fast, easy, and they taste so good! I'm on my second one right now, and seriously contemplating a third. Great recipe!!
12/14/2009
This is the best pretzel recipe. So easy and the texture is perfect! Oh the butter at the end, it gave the pretzels such a nice shine and yummy taste! Thank you for the recipe!
12/18/2009
These were SO delicious! The only difficulty I had was that I used baking parchment for half of the pretzels, but they stuck to the parchment because of the baking soda bath. I wasn't able to peel them off the parchment, so I had to cut away some of the delicious pretzel. The other half I plopped on a Pam-sprayed baking sheet, and those came off the cookie sheet just fine.
01/31/2010
These are delicious pretzels. I did half KAF all purpose flour and half white whole wheat flour and they had a slightly nutty flavor and great texture. My only complaint is that KAF doesn't seem to sell the pretzel salt that would make these pretzels even more amazing!
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