Monday, September 1, 2008

Lazy Sunday: Soft pretzel making


I was reeeeeeally lazy this weekend. I didn't put my contacts in until 4 in the afternoon yesterday (a bad sign -- I can't see more than five feet in front of me with my glasses on). David and I watched a total of three episodes of Mad Men, five episodes of Weeds, and at least two episodes of The Simpsons. I can count the number of times I left the house the entire weekend on three fingers.

In an attempt to wake from our Labor Day weekend stupor, we set about making the soft pretzel recipe I'd read about recently on Joy the Baker, one of my new favorite blogs now that I'm interested in baking. Unfortunately, we ran into some problems. The initial dough was incredibly sticky, and we ended up adding at least an additional 1/2 cup of flour so that we could knead it. The final product tasted okay, but not as good as homemade pretzels I'd made in the past with my grandparents. They actually tasted more like bagels than pretzels. It turns out bagels and pretzels are made of the exact same ingredients, so I'm not really sure what makes a pretzel taste like a pretzel.

In any event, we covered ours with kosher salt and cinnamon sugar and ate two straight out of the oven. The cat got one before we could put them away. Today (as Joy the Baker warned) they're pretty chewy, but they're still made with flour and yeast and they still have salt or sugar on top of them, so how could they really be bad?

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