Today I decided to challenge myself with Martha’s Soft Pretzels from the Northeast on page 124.
Why are pretzels a challenge? Because you need to make a bread dough, which is always a little more difficult than your average kitchen task. But the hardest part for something like pretzels is getting it to look like a pretzel!
Making the dough actually wasn’t too hard. I’m becoming more use to the challenge of bread making. Do you know that old joke ‘Excuse me, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ with the answer being ‘Practice, man, practice.’ Bread doughs are like that! Julia Child spent 3 years working on perfecting a baguette recipe for the home cook. Modern kitchens have become more user-friendly for baking bread than they were in the 1960s. But it’s still not easy to make the perfect bread. One trick I’ve picked up over the years is to put an ice cube in the oven while you’re baking because the steam generated will help the bread develop the right consistency.
The recipe for the dough was pretty straight-forward and easy enough to put together. It’s after you cut the dough into pretzel size amounts that things get interesting. First you need to roll out each piece into a rope using your hands until it’s 20 inches long. You need to do this in such a way that the entire thing stays even — you can’t have a thick part in the middle with thin parts toward the end. Many of my early attempts at doing this made my rope fall apart! Then you need to do the pretzel shape, which sounds easy enough, but the hard part is pulling out the sides a bit so that it’s not squished — this too resulted in the heartbreak of many broken pretzels…le sigh! And the good times are not over yet. After you let your pretzels rise you need to get them into boiling water without tearing them. Once they’re in the water you need to give them a turn. Here I have a quibble with Martha’s recipe, because it suggests you use tongs to do that and I did. Guess what my pretzel did? Yep, it fell apart! Ah, there was indeed so much falling apart in this process. I found that using a spatula to flip them in the water worked better. Finally, if you make it through all of this with at least one pretzel in tact, you give ’em some salt and bake them in the oven.
My first batch came out looking pretty silly, but they tasted good! Finally, through the process of trial and error I got a few decent looking pretzels in my second batch. I used coarse salt which I’m not accustomed to working with and I definitely overdid it. I think you can actually notice that when you look at the picture. But it wasn’t hard to shake some salt off and that improved them greatly.
So after all of that, how were the pretzels? Delicious! These pretzels were warm and soft — way better than anything you’ll get from a street vendor. They taste great with a little spicy mustard and a beer to drink them down with. I liked the addition of a little cayenne pepper that gave them a nice spicy bite.
Sometimes the toughest kitchen tasks are the most rewarding. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again until you get it right and in the end you’ll have something homemade and delicious to reward yourself with!
