Homemade Pretzels for the win!

Call us Tita Joyce and Uncle Brian because we just made our own pretzels!

I was inspired by Auntie Anne's, one of my favourite childhood snacks, so I looked for a recipe online for Brian's and my cooking date. I went with the first one I found, a fairly simple one that required ingredients we already had at home; the only things I had to get were yeast, butter, and baking soda (ran out of the last two!).

The first step was to prepare the yeast. Unlike the time we made pizza dough, the recipe required that we use active dry yeast, which needed proofing with water and sugar. The proportions on the packet were slightly different from the recipe's, but we chose to go with the latter and watched our yeast go from a milky-looking liquid to downright foam as we measured out the other ingredients of the dough. It made the kitchen smell very yeasty, and it reminded Brian of the time he spent with his grandmother making bread. :)

Once ready, we poured the yeast foam and some vegetable oil into our bowl of dry ingredients and started mixing and kneading, adding water as needed. After a lot of elbow grease, it started to resemble dough. We covered the bowl with plastic wrap and waited for an hour, the result of which you see above: puffy dough that's almost double its original size.

Interestingly, Brian's rough didn't rise as much, and we think it's because of the yeast he bought. Either way, the texture and look of the dough was the same for the two of us.

We divided our dough 12 ways and got rolling. It was a lot harder than we thought! My first few pretzels looked like crap. Literal crap. Hahaha. We kept working away at them, adding water section-by-section to get enough friction between the dough and the kitchen counter. After 3 pretzels, I finally got the hang of the rolling/stretching technique and attempted the Auntie Anne's "twirl-the-dough-in-the-air-to-get-a-perfect-twist" technique. I failed.

We dipped our pretzels in baking soda and water, sprinkled some kosher salt on top, and popped them in the oven for 8 minutes. While waiting, we melted some butter to brush on the finished pretzels. I decided to be extra and prepared a cinnamon sugar topping too.

After 8 minutes, my first tray of pretzels were done! I took them out of the oven, placing my second tray on the top rack to bake for another minute. I brushed my first batch with butter and dipped some in cinnamon-sugar. I also sprinkled a little bit of rosemary and thyme on a few of them, ending up with 3 different kinds of pretzels.

Although I felt I went a little light on the kosher salt, I thought the pretzels tasted quite good for homemade ones. A little on the sweet side maybe, but they definitely had the right texture. Of the 3, the cinnamon sugar one was the most popular, followed by the rosemary and thyme and plain pretzels. Over in Santiago, Brian told me that his pretzels ended up on the crunchy side. However, they still tasted very much like pretzels, which sounds like success to me. ;)

We would definitely make this recipe again and with different toppings too. Particularly keen on a pepperoni one, for starters. :P