Hello and welcome our nice visitors. We’ll teach you how to make a German-style pretzel that is soft and chewy, crunchy snack pretzels all the way up to much larger soft and chewy pretzels.

Ingredients To make pretzels :

• 250 grams of bread flour
• 150 grams of lukewarm
• Water
• a teaspoon of salt
• a tablespoon of softened butter cut into little pieces
• a teaspoon of dried yeast
• a half teaspoon of dark
• brown soft sugar

Put the sugar and yeast into the water, mix well to dissolve the sugar, then leave for 10 minutes for the yeast to activate. Put the flour, salt, and butter in a bowl, and mix well. When you encounter a bit of butter, just rub it into the flour. Now make a well in the center, pouring in your yeasty water, and then work some dough in from the sides and mix it together. Keep working flour in from the sides into this pool in the middle. You can see the center’s like a paste, so we’ll just stop there and just flick some of the flour from the sides onto the top of the paste.

Now, we’re going to leave it for about 30 to 40 minutes. This is called a sponge, and it’s going to add some extra flavor to the dough, so we’ll just cover it while it’s sponging. After about 40 minutes or so, this sponge bit in the middle should be nice and bubbly, so we can mix the dough. When it’s all mixed, you should end up with a slightly tacky dough.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it for about 10 minutes until it’s smooth. You should end up with a lovely, soft, silky, and springy kido. Now pop it into a greased bowl, cover it, and leave it to rise in a warm place until it about doubles in size.

When the dough has risen, turn it out, knock it back in with all three air bubbles, bring it together into a ball, flatten it down a bit, then cut it into four approximately equal pieces. Now put three of the pieces off to one side and cover them with a cloth. Take this piece, press it out into a rectangle, and next roll it up tightly into a sausage. Pinch the seams together

Then roll it out to about 12 inches long. Once you’ve got it to about 12 inches long, just put it to one side. Take one of the other pieces of dough, and do the same with that. You’ll end up with four 12-inch long rows of dough. Now take the first one that you rolled out and roll it out about 24 inches in length.

The idea is that the middle should be fatter, then the ends should gradually taper out, so work on the ends. When you’ve got your dough to about two feet long, make it into a loopy shape, cross one side over the other, then take the bottom and stretch it across the top, and the bottom across to the top, and press. You’ll see your pretzel shape. Then transfer to a lightly greased baking tray, then spread your pretzels across 2 baking trays to give them plenty of space to rise. Put each tray into a plastic bag, and leave it in a warm place for about 1 hour to rise.

After about 1 hour, they should have risen quite well. Now for the next stage, we’re going to put these in the freezer for about 30 to 40 minutes to firm up the dough. Now if we were in a professional bakery, the next stage would involve dipping the pretzel dough into a warm solution of lye, otherwise known as caustic soda. Now in our opinion, the last thing you want to be doing in your kitchen is handling pans of hot acidic soda solutions. It’s highly corrosive, it can cause very nasty burns if it gets on your skin, and if it’s unfortunate enough to get in your eye, it can turn you blind. Our strong advice to you is to leave the lye to the professionals.

The line does give the pretzels their unique taste, but there is an alternative that gets you most of the way there, and it’s a lot simpler and a lot safer to do it. We’ll teach you how to take a stainless steel pan, and put in about one and a half liters of water, and add in about a third of a cup of bicarbonate of soda. Then bring it to a boil. As it comes to a boil, it’ll start to foam, and once it comes to a boil, turn off the heat. Now after 30 minutes in the freezer, the dough should be nice and firm.

Now, one at a time, drop them into the liquid, leave for 10 seconds, and then turn them over to the other side. After another 10 seconds, remove them from the liquid, and place them back on the baking tray. Brush the pretzels with a mixture of 1 egg yolk and a tablespoon of water to help give them a lovely color and shine. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

Don’t keep the pretzels. It’s better to feed them very well, and they’re always best eaten on the day that you bake them. If you do need to keep them until the following day, put them in a warm oven or a microwave just to warm them back up again. We hope you enjoy making your German-style pretzels with your family and your best friends. Thank you for reading this perfect recipe.

ENJOY!!!