Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make soft pretzel bites.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here!
And today I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested,
well researched, and perfected recipe.
Today's recipe is a great copycat if you love those mall pretzels,
but don't feel like actually putting on pants and going out to the mall.
They're surprisingly simple to make, so let's go ahead and get started.
Now the first ingredient for today's recipe is bread
flour. You're going to need about 3 cups
bread flour in total, but
for starters, I like to only add about 2 cups of flour into a large mixing bowl.
I actually added a little bit more than I wanted to, that's fine,
just means it's going to be a little more work getting everything together.
The next thing you'll need is three tablespoons of firmly
packed, light brown sugar and 2 to 4 teaspoons of instant, or rapid rise,
yeast. We’ll add 1 teaspoon of salt.
And this is just regular table salt at this point.
We're going to use a different salt for the tops of our pretzels,
and we'll mix these all together. Next,
we're going to add 2 tablespoons of melted,
unsalted butter. And you're also going to need one cup of hot water.
Now, specifically, you want this water to be about 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
I always like to use an instant-read thermometer to make sure we do have it at the right temperature
because water that is too cold,
can fail to activate your yeast and water
that is too hot, can actually kill it,
so you want to have it right in that sweet spot of around 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now we're going to stir everything together. You want to make sure you're using a sturdy
spatula or a wooden spoon.
This recipe could also be made in a stand mixer
using a dough hook attachment, but, today,
I'm just going to be doing it by hand, which is kind of obnoxious
because I added a little bit more flour than I wanted to initially,
which can make combining everything quite an arm workout.
Do yourself a favor and be a little bit more sparing when you first add
your first two cups of flour. All right,
now once you do have your flour completely combined,
we're going to assess the consistency of our dough and add more flour as needed.
Now, with yeast doughs you generally want to go based off of the
texture rather than a specific amount of flour.
What we're looking for is a dough that is clinging to itself.
It should not be overly dry, but it should be pulling away from the sides of the bowl.
And if you touch it, it should be slightly tacky to the touch
but it shouldn't be so sticky that the dough is just coming off on your fingers
and making a huge mess in your hands.
Now this dough is approaching a nice consistency, but I want to get things a little bit smoother.
If I were using a stand mixer, I would be using the dough hook attachment
and I would just mix it until it was beginning to look a little bit more smooth and elastic,
but, since I'm doing this by hand, I'm just going to turn out onto a lightly floured surface.
And I'm just going to knead everything briefly.
I spend probably two to three minutes kneading
it, and I just want to have a nice, smooth looking and cohesive ball of dough.
This is looking pretty good,
so now I'm going to grab a large, clean bowl
and I’m just going to drizzle a little bit of olive oil in that and use a paper towel
to make sure that I get the sides and bottom lightly coated. We’ll drop our dough in there.
I always like to turn it to make sure the entire surface of the dough is
covered in a really thin film of olive oil.
And of course, if you don't have olive oil, you can substitute vegetable or canola oil.
Now we’ll cover this tightly. We're going to place this dough in a warm draft-free place to rise
until it's at least doubled in size. For me,
this usually takes about 30 to 60 minutes.
All right, now around this time, I like to start preheating my oven
because it needs to preheat to 450 degrees Fahrenheit
and sometimes that can take a little while for your oven to get to that temperature.
Now once the dough has risen, we're going to turn it out again to a clean surface
and you can lightly flour the surface as well,
but I do want to caution you that you do not want to use too much flour at this point,
and that is because once we start rolling out the dough into ropes, adding too much flour
can actually make it difficult to work with, it can make the dough kind of pull back in on itself
a lot more than you want it to. So just be really sparing with a flour at this point.
Only use as much as you absolutely need.
So I'm going now to divide this dough into 5
even—even-ish pieces.
And I'm going to roll each of these pieces into a rope
and I want to make that rope about 12 inches long.
Now we'll just use a sharp knife and cut this rope into bite-sized pieces,
which is just going to be about one to one and a half inches wide.
Now we'll transfer these to a parchment paper lined
baking sheet, give them a little bit of space between them.
And you're probably going to need two baking sheets for this.
Just repeat with the remaining dough until you've rolled out and cut all of your pretzel bites.
Now one of the most important things when you're making soft pretzels, or pretzel bites
in today's instance, is that you need to boil them.
You're going to need to give them a baking soda bath before you can cook them.
That's what's going to give them their distinct pretzel flavor.
So to do this, you are going to need a large pot.
And I have mine filled with 8 cups of water, and I'm going to be adding 1/4 cup of baking soda.
Sounds like a lot. It is a lot, but that is how much you're going to need.
I'll just use a spoon to briefly stir
this so that that baking soda is nicely distributed into the water.
Now we're going to bring this water to a full rolling boil.
And once it is boiling, we are going to just lower a handful of the
pretzel bites at a time into the water,
and we're just going to boil them in batches. I find mine typically
need to boil for about 30 seconds.
If I feel like the tops are not getting submerged in the water enough,
I'll flip those over and let them boil a little bit longer before
removing them from the water, letting the excess water drain off,
and returning them to my parchment paper lined
baking sheet.
All right, now to help encourage a nice, golden brown exterior on these pretzel bites,
we are going to brush them lightly with a little bit of an egg wash,
which is just one large egg whisked together with one teaspoon of water.
I'm just using a pastry brush to lightly brush all of my pretzels,
and I want to make sure that the pretzels are spaced a little bit.
You want to give them just little bit of room. They’re not going to grow much in the oven or anything,
but you don't want them sticking together while they bake.
Now before popping these in the oven, you're going to want to toss them with a coarse salt.
If you can get your hands on pretzel salt, you absolutely want to do that.
I will link to this one that I just found on Amazon in the description,
but, if you can't find pretzel salt,
coarse salt, like coarse sea salt, will work instead.
We'll just sprinkle these with a little bit of salt.
Zach loves a lot of salt on his. I don't like too much on my mine,
so it can be difficult to compromise sometimes.
And then we'll take this over to our 450 degrees Fahrenheit oven where they're going to need
bake for about nine minutes. You're going to want to watch the pretzels pretty carefully.
And when they start to turn a nice deep golden brown,
you'll want to take them out of the oven. Now you just have to let these cool
for a little bit and then you can go ahead and dig right in.
And I want to show you just how soft and chewy and, I don’t know, perfectly pretzel-y
these guys are. And that is how you make homemade soft pretzel bites.
I hope you guys enjoy today's recipe. And if you try this one out,
please leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
I always love hearing from you. Thank you guys
so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
They're really good.