Weekend mornings are the best time for baking. I can hardly remember a Saturday morning growing up when I wasn’t gently woken up by the inviting aroma of my dad’s homemade Norwegian bread or my mom’s Hong Kong style sweet rolls. (To be sure, there were certainly weekends when my parents had the audacity to choose extra sleep over fresh baked delights, but those were dark times I’ve blocked from my memory.) However, I must confess that I have only engaged in this weekend ritual a handful of times since I’ve lived on my own. Though the oven (first a knock off Easy Bake oven, then the oven in my 6th grade home ec class) was my introduction to the culinary world, I’ve since abandoned baking for more interactive and quite frankly more forgiving cooking adventures on the stove.
That is until I picked up Michael Pollan’s latest food narrative on the anthropological, social and emotional necessity of cooking a few days ago. In Cooked, Pollan beautifully relays the history of cooking through the metaphorical lens of each classical element. The “Air” chapter centers on bread, specifically the way yeast and air transform something as common as wheat into a food staple of every cuisine. Prior to reading that chapter, I had never really stopped to appreciate how much labor both the yeast’s microorganisms and the baker put into making a single loaf of bread. It’s so easy to select from dozens of artisan and processed breads at the grocery store that it’s even harder to fathom how our ancestors discovered the bread making process, let alone spent hours making simple breads.
“Compared with earlier and simpler methods humans have devised for turning plants and animals into foods, a loaf of bread implies a whole civilization. It emerges only at the end of a long, complicated process…involving an intricate division of human, plant, and even microbial labor.”
Enlightened and determined to finally wield the magic powers of yeast, I decided to make soft pretzels from scratch. I probably should have started with a simple loaf but I couldn’t resist making one of my favorite salty snacks. Whether I’m at the county fair, the movies, or a shopping mall, I absolutely cannot turn down a good, old fashioned soft pretzel. Whether they’re drenched in cinnamon sugar or swimming in a tub of processed cheese, soft pretzels melt my heart as they melt in my mouth. Add in some Sriracha, cheddar and green onions, and I found myself torn between sharing with my friends to show off my new recipe and keeping them all to myself. However, a few tips for those daring enough to make these pretzels from scratch:
- Try to roll your pretzels out as long and thin as possible. After they’ve been shaped and sit in the oven, the dough swells back up and the pretzel can lose its shape. However, don’t sweat it if you don’t roll your pretzels perfectly. The oven is pretty forgiving and even the most lopsided ones turn out okay.
- The baking soda bath is optional, at least for this recipe. Some of you may have heard that simmering the pretzels in a baking soda bath prior to baking is necessary for that golden brown color and crust. (I also learned that most commercial bakeries use food grade lye to accomplish this standard pretzel finish, which only inspired me to make more pretzels from scratch.) While I suppose this wouldn’t hurt, I found that the egg wash created a perfectly sufficient thin, crispy coating and the Sriracha/cheddar additions keep the pretzel coming out a pale and white.
- For those of you with sensitive skin, it would be prudent to use gloves when kneading the Sriracha dough or rolling the pretzels.
- To form pretzel shapes, roll 1 cup of dough into 18 inch ropes of 1 inch thickness. Form a U shape and twist the ends together twice. Fold the in half to form pretzels (see picture below).
Other than that, have fun, share with your friends, and worst case scenario, be prepared to make an Auntie Anne’s run.
