Ep. 1 – Pretzel from Frau Merkel

This year all articles with my kitchen experiments will be labeled “disaster in the kitchen”. Because there will be recipes for disasters as big as me. 😀 For everyone else there are specialized cooking sites. 🙂

At the end of last year I wanted to make breadsticks. From the recipe on the internet it seemed super simple and easy, in reality it was the opposite. Instead of breadsticks, I got some kind of long pizza dough, in which you could have broken your teeth after a few days…

This episode calmed me down for a month or so (also the 2 extra pounds :))), then I just remembered the Bavarian pretzels and said, ok, let’s see how they are made and if they can be reproduced at home.

I came across 2 types of dough – one that looks like pizza dough, only it’s made with measured ingredients and not out of sight, as I usually do (lol Claudia!); the second one has milk and butter in it – we will experiment one day with this variant and come back with the conclusions.

For the dough from which I got 10 pieces: 10 g of yeast (1 sachet), 30 grams of sugar (1 tablespoon), 300 ml of lukewarm water, salt to taste – leave for a few minutes, to activate the yeast, 500 g of flour. I forgot the salt – I usually forget something :)) – and I kneaded with the robot for about 5 minutes and finally with my hand, to mix well all the ingredients. Leave to rise for about an hour until it doubles in volume, then mix a few times until the air bubbles come out and portion in 10. And now comes the super cool part: each piece is shaped like a pretzel, with the middle part thicker and the other rolled, to get an 8 form. Before baking, put each pretzel for 10 seconds in a solution with baking soda – in a pot with 3.5 l of boiling water add 3 tablespoons of baking soda and mix. Put the pretzels from the baking soda solution on baking paper, make a cut lightly on the thick side, sprinkle with coarse salt and then bake in the oven at the right heat, 20-30 minutes, until colored. Mine came out with a taste of sticks, crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside and they kind of lost their pretzel shape, because they didn’t have enough space in the tray :))) But it’s ok, I can use them for sandwiches. 🙂

And if you don’t take my word for it, this link leads to a video with a nice guy, who does about the same thing, only puts brown sugar and mixes the yeast directly into the dough.

The last pretzel I baked kept its shape, although it looks sadder than its colleagues. It’s not bad, I don’t think it will last too long. :))

See here all the disasters in the kitchen. 🙂