Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day
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bes30 from ,
This pretzel recipe is amazing. I was amazed by how much these pretzels truly taste, look and feel like traditional soft pretzels.
I read many online sources on pretzels and many said it was worth it to use the lye solution (hence the darker color of my pictures vs. the book), so I decided to buy it off the internet and be VERY careful. The lye solution I used for the whole recipe was 21 grams per 2 cups of water and since I was using a fairly big saucepan, I needed 8 cups of water.
I don't really have any complaints about this recipe or the final result, but I would caution other bakers that this recipe is time consuming (BUT FUN!) and quite difficult to achieve the desired result. The dough is very elastic, so it is very difficult to shape a very large pretzel without it snapping back to a smaller size.
Also, my oven to 400 degrees F (like the recipe says) produced difficult results. The recipe states to bake "until the pretzels are a rich brown". The pretzels were very brown after the first 8 minutes, so i decided to take them out before the end of the 2nd 8 to 10 minutes (after 4 minutes), but they were underdone and still raw in the middle. I had to bake them for the full 16 minutes (8 on each rotation) to ensure they were baked all the way through, but the result was very brown pretzels, but they still tasted VERY GOOD! I should note the amount of time the pretzels soaked in the lye solution was not stated in the recipe, so I used other online sources that said 15 seconds. The lye solution could have been the reason why they were so brown so early. Next time I will try them while only dipping them to coat in the lye solution.
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