Monday, February 27, 2012

Variations of No Fail Pretzels

Today I saw a picture of some pretzel bites and thought, those look so YUMMY! I looked at the recipe for them and was a little intimidated by the words "yeast". Always looking for a simpler way to make something, I decided to search for any yeast-less recipes. This is the one I tried today that worked pretty well, if I do say so myself. *I will star my variations.

Prep Time: 10 min <--- me being me, this did not happen. More like 20 min.
Cook Time: 15 min
Total Time: 25 min

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons margarine
1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded mild Cheddar cheese *(didn't add this in because I didn't have any)
2/3 cup milk
1 egg, beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt *(used cinnamon and sugar for some and Santa Maria style seasoning for others)

Prep:
Combine first 4 ingredients in a medium bowl; cut in margarine with a pastry blender *(I used an electric mixer; works just fine!) until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add cheese and milk *(or just milk if that is all you got), stirring until dry ingredients are just moistened. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead about 12 times. 

Divide dough in half and roll each half into a 12x8-inch rectangle. Cut dough lengthwise into eight 1 inch strips. Twist each into a pretzel shape *(OR take a small chunk of dough in your hand. It should fit in the palm of your hand. I like to flour my hand lightly so that dough doesn't stick to me. Roll this out like you used to roll out snakes with play-dough. Spread your fingers out when the dough gets longer so it doesn't roll out of control. Twist this into a pretzel shape and place on greased pan); brush with beaten egg and sprinkle with coarse salt *(or whatever you'd like to top your pretzel with). Bake at 400 degrees for fifteen min or until golden brown. Cool pretzels for a few min on wire racks; serce pretzels warm. 
Makes about 16 pretzels


This is how my first batch turned out. 
I noticed that the smaller ones didn't have as soft a center as the thicker ones. So if you like your pretzels softer, make them thicker when you're rolling them out. Santa Maria seasoned pretzels tasted AWESOME (but of course it is my favorite seasoning) and the cinnamon and sugar ones could have used a little bit more sugar and cinnamon. All in all, very yummy!

Second batch:

Followed the above recipe but when you're adding the milk, I added Hershey's chocolate syrup to it, just to see if I could make chocolate pretzels. It makes the dough stickier though. I added a little more flour at the end before I kneaded the dough to account for the stickiness. The second alteration I made was adding a Reese's peanut butter cup to the mix. I made a dough ball, flattened the dough, and placed the peanut butter cup in the middle and rap the candy in the dough. Sprinkle with sugar after brushing with egg and bake like the other ones.

This is how the second batch turned out.
As you can see, some of the guts of the candy pretzels decided to spill out. I'm not sure how to fix this. 
These didn't really taste all that chocolaty though, except the ones with the candy in the middle. They tasted sweeter though. Very yummy!



That's it for today! Keep cooking out there! We'll see what the next recipe I find is!

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