Foto Friday: homemade pretzels edition. 1 February 2008 5:00 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,baking,books,pictures,seasonality , trackbackOur story begins last week, on Wednesday, January 23, at Eugene’s own fabulous Black Sun Books — where, faithful readers may remember, I spotted some wise words. That bookshelf decoration inspired me to check out my library’s copies of Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking and its sequel, More Home Cooking a few days later, though I haven’t managed even to open those yet because I’m somehow even more swamped with things to read than usual. But I digress. As my Flickr caption of that picture suggests, I made a very happy find not far from those wise words, in Black Sun’s cookbook section. Honestly, it felt a bit like winning the lottery:
Woo-hoo! $21 and barely used? I call that a mighty victory indeed!
You can bet I snatched it up and made for home with all kinds of excitement. Sure, there’s a fair amount of content overlap between Baking Illustrated and my beloved copy of The New Best Recipe, and BI has a suspiciously large number of really beautiful photos of baked goods, but still. Worth it for the baked Alaska recipe alone, oh yes.
Anyway. It being winter, and hence a fabulous time to huddle in front of an oven full of deliciousness, this cookbook could not have come at a better time. By last Saturday, Peter and I were ready for a culinary adventure, and we got it in the form of homemade soft pretzels, woo!
The thing I learned about soft pretzels is that they’re like bagels lite and more forgiving. Sure, there’s a yeasted dough and a boil-before-baking stage, but really, when they’re warm and fresh and you’ve got good mustard nearby, it’s pretty much impossible to notice any flaws in, well, the whole world, really. Which makes homemade soft pretzels very different from the ones I’ve bought — those were always sort of weird at best, but bland, gummy, stale, and undercooked at worst. But now I know how good soft pretzels can be! Here’s Peter, boiling them (I turned out to be very good at the shaping stage of operations, but after that I got out of the way):
Next, pretzels waiting to go in the oven. You can see that the ones on the left are darker and puffed up from having been boiled:
The pretzels on the right in that last picture still need the hot-water treatment, and to drip dry, like so:
Once dried, the pretzels went back onto the baking sheet for topping:
and after baking, they were spectacular indeed:
Yum! Not bad for a lazy Saturday night!
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Cj
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Linley
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Betty
