Pain in the Pretzel

Its been a while since I last baked - life seemed to get in the way a lot towards the end of last year but for Christmas I received a few recipe books as gifts and they renewed my desire to create great bakes once more. I spent a good while looking through them all and marking the recipes that took my fancy and one of those was Pretzels.

I decided to tackle these for a couple of reasons; I'd never made them before and as I've stated before on this blog I like to attempt lots of different types of bakes rather than just stick to one type, I also assumed they would probably be a bit of a challenge.

You probably could say (and I'm sure an experienced baker would...) that doing pretzels is a walk in the park and for the first part it is. The dough is a regular white bread dough, just enriched with a little melted butter and a couple of teaspoons of sugar. It's after the dough is needed that, for me, things got tricky.

In order to shape the pretzels you first need to roll out the dough into long sausages, it's during this process that I discovered that not only was I rubbish at writing with my left hand, I'm pretty darn spazzy at rolling out dough too. This meant that one side was continually thicker than the other - I tried to counteract this by flipping the dough around regularly. After a good while I finally found myself with a few sausages of dough. (incidentally its a REALLY good arm workout, mine were actually aching at the end, I'm going to convince myself its because its hard work not because I'm weak and unfit!)

Then came the most important thing: the shaping:

My recipe book did little to help explain how to do it correctly so I turned to old faithful,  Youtube, which quickly shined some light on the situation.

In the end I managed to create a few things that looked at least a little bit like pretzels; consistency is not my strong point, but it was a first attempt.  I decided to mix it up and made a couple of plaits and one big pretzel to go with the little ones. I think the one thing I could do to improve would to be to have thinner sausages so that the pretzels don't loose their shape as much when rising and cooking.

The overall verdict is that they don't taste too bad, I think the dough could do with being a little sweeter, but that can be tweaked easily enough. They taste nice even if they don't look quite so good. (This seems to be a theme of mine!)

All-in-all they are not so much a walk in the park, but a bit more of a sweaty jog in the park.