A Profusion of Pretzels

A friend's Oktoberfest party gave me a good excuse to make a big batch of soft pretzels recently (and by big, I mean that I used an entire 5 lb bag of flour, which was quite a feat).

Making pretzels can be a lengthy process if you are tripling the recipe, so I started the night before by preparing the dough and letting it rise and then covering it loosely with plastic wrap and sticking it into the fridge overnight.

The only disadvantage to this was that I needed to let it warm up to room temperature the following morning, and I'm not known for my patience. I started kneading and dividing the dough while it was still pretty cool, and the effort reminded me of my days playing tennis, when I used to work my hand muscles with grip exercises. I didn't have much success rolling out ropes of dough as long as 24 inches (as stipulated in my recipe, courtesy of Alton Brown) to coil into the pretzel shape, and perhaps that's why they came out rather fat and compact.

Alton Brown says to boil each pretzel for thirty seconds in a mixture of water and baking soda, then brush it with egg yolk and sprinkle with pretzel salt before baking at 450 degrees. He recommends leaving the pretzels in the oven until they turn dark brown, but I prefer mine a little lighter in color, and I used coarse sea salt instead of pretzel salt, which worked out just fine. 

We served the pretzels with four kinds of mustard, alongside some grilled sausages and roasted pumpkin. They were agreeably doughy, with a good, yeasty flavor. And as one friend commented, "These are great for a party because they soak up a lot of booze."