Twisted Good

My boyfriend and I took a trek up to Blue Ridge for Apple Picking season and got some "Mercier's Honey Mustard Pretzel Dipping Sauce." So naturally, we needed to make pretezels to try it out.

On my recipe board http://pinterest.com/marlipaige/recipees/ I had taken a pretzel recipe pinned from his cousin http://pinterest.com/pin/141089400797424356/

It was fairly easy and straightforward. Basically, you take all the ingredients, blend it together (though we used a hand dough kneader and not a big stand mixer)

After completely mixing the ingredients, you just coat the bowl with cooking spray (we used the pinterest 5:1 homemade olive oil and water kind instead of pam) and make sure the dough is coated too.  Then you seal it in the bowl with cling or press and seal wrap and let it rise for 45 minutes.

At this point we start to preheat my baking stone (it's a double baking and grilling stone the best gift EVER) while the dough is rising.

Now it's not necessary that you use a hand kneader or a baking stone, but I think it made a lot of difference.


Once it had risen we separated it into 8 even pieces (Andy just made it like a pizza dough and used a pizza cutter). Then we balled each of the 8 pieces. Then we oiled down the counter and began to roll them out. What I found was the easiest thing to do was:

1. Take the ball and make it an oblong shape in your hands
2. Put it down and use a glass to roll it into a long snake
3. Fold the excess width back into the snake, turn over, and roll again.

You repeat this until it's about 1.5-2 feet long. Then I would twist it to keep it together, long, and sturdy. Then fold the pretzel shape and really push in the edges. If you don't REALLY work to keep it together it will fall apart during the next part.

You drop it into boiling water for 30 seconds. Pull it out, coat it with egg wash, re-salt it, and pop it onto the baking stone.

As you can see some of them turned out beautiful and some of them turned out funky looking. That was just trial and error of the whole pressing in the edges to keep the shape. However, they all turned out golden brown and DELICIOUS! We each ate 2 and then froze the rest for later.