Soft Sweet Pretzels. Delikatne słodkie precle.

I always get a craving when I go past one of those soft pretzel places in the malls. And I saw one on Friday. Challenge accepted, delicious pretzel place.

Zawsze łapię smaka, gdy przechodzę obok miejsc sprzedających miękkie precelki w cynamonie, dość powszechne w centrach handlowych Wielkiej Brytanii. Tak jak w piątek. Wyzwanie podjęte, precelkownio.

All I needed was a good recipe, and I found one.

An important disclaimer here: full credit for this recipe goes to the author of “Things we make” blog. Before you tuck into those beauties you’ve just baked, go thank Claire. She totally deserves it. And has nice pictures there. I am simply copying it here for the record to match it in Polish translation.

Without further ado, let’s make some pretzels.

Planning

Close to none. You make the dough, give it about an hour, shape it, dip it, bake it, cover in butter, put in sugar, done. It took me about two hours only because I made the dough to dry.

Ingredients

Dough

• 7 g quick action yeast (one pack)
• 2 tablespoons caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 275 g strong wheat flour
• 275 g plain wheat flour
• 350 ml lukewarm milk
• 100 g melted butter

Soda bath

• 2 cups very hot water
• 2 tablespoons bicarbonate of soda

Coating

• 50 g melted butter
• Some mix of caster sugar and cinnamon (mixed together)

Preparation

1. Mix yeast, salt, sugar and flours in a large bowl

2. Combine warm milk with melted 100 grams of butter. It’s good to use something handy to pour from

3. While mixing the dry mixture, gradually pour the milky mixture into it until it combines into a soft ball of dough. Do not repeat my mistake here – the moment it combined, I drank the rest of milk and the dough turned out a bit to dry. It was ok-ish, but did not stick together well and was a bit to firm for me. If it was to me now, I would have added 80% of the wet mixture at ones and the add more if needed. I think I added about 70%

4. Cover the bowl and put it in a warm place for 1-2 hours to rise. It took mine 1 hour to double

5. Prepare hot water for the bath and turn the oven on to 200 C

6. Divide the dough in 16 roughly equal weight portions of dough, then roll them into thin strips. Mine were about 40-50 cm long. The dough was to dry and it did not work ideally, so I first preshaped it and when all were done partially, I repeated the rolling to extend even longer and then formed the pretzels. The dough regains plasticity when it rests

7. You don’t need to make pretzels at all, it can be spirals, sticks, whatever you like. If you make pretzels and they don’t stick with the ends, you’ll have a chance to fix this after the bath. Mines all detached in the water and then easily held the sticking point after I corrected it

8. Add bicarbonate of soda to the water and dip your pretzels for a bit, then let them drain a little

9. Put your pretzels on baking trays and into the oven. 4-5 minutes, then rotate the tray and 4-5 more minutes. Melt the butter for brushing the pretzels. I also mixed the sugar and cinammon in a bowl. I like mines very sugary

10. Take them out of the oven, brush with butter, dip in sugar, put aside to cool a little bit (but not too much)

    

    Pretzels on a cooling rack

11. Eat

Pretzels

They were delicious. Antoni did not want cinnamon, so we just brushed some with butter so that they soften nicely, but did not dip. We had sixteen, two went to the neighbours, two to our friends, one is still left, but not for long, probably.