Yesterday, I had the bright idea to juice-fast but was seduced from
the liquid path by a trip to the thrift store. I was walking the
aisles hoping to find a raclette (miracles do happen at Goodwill) when I
saw an appliance on the American end of the culinary spectrum: a
bright yellow pretzel maker. I put it in my cart and wandered around
for a while failing to find a raclette.
The
background to the pretzel impulse was a family trip to a gastropub. Hot
pretzels with mustard or, god forbid, liquid cheese dip, proved popular. The yellow pretzel appliance implied that I could make
delicious carby-twists at home. Then I got thinking. Surely the appliance
would only
cook the pretzel. There were little pretzel-shaped
depressions in the non-stick base which would, presumably guide me to
shape my dough but nowhere was there any dough extrusion equipment. I
googled and my suspicions were confirmed - the one star reviews said
"This is fine for people who like to make bread!"
"Well, hell yeah!" Father than act as a deterrent, I was now inspired. I like to make bread. I could make pretzels.
On
return from the thrift store I found the family in their usual
head-down-in-electronics mode and dragged Frost into the kitchen to make
pretzels with me. We pulled up the first recipe and Frost read it out
while I ran around the kitchen grabbing ingredients. Yes, don't ask me
how we happened to have non-expired Active Dry Yeast and cows milk and
barley malt syrup in the house at the same time. I have already spoken
about miracles once in this post so I won't go there but it happened.
It
turns out pretzels are a lot easier than bread. You throw the yeast
into warm milk, add flour and sugar and stir, bang it about a bit and
let it double in size. Then, bang it around a bit more, make 30 inch
long worms in pretzel shapes, dip into boiling water with baking soda
and malt in and bake for 12 minutes!
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| The first pretzel worm being formed (30 inches is long!) |
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| Frost forming his pretzel |
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| Wren with the malt soda bath "It looks like erupting root beer" (don't know what that expression is on Wren's face) |
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| The fattest pretzel. Others were better proportioned |
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| Eating pretzels with mahjong |
Pros:
- We had pretzels in 90 minutes
- Frost learned to knead dough
- Josh tapped into his long-unused expertise in dipping bagels in a malt-bath
- We used the Murray River Gourmet Salt Flakes we've had for ages.
- It was fun to make pretzels.
- It was fun to eat pretzels.
Cons:
- The kitchen was a mess. Dough is basically glue.
- I ate 1.5 pretzels on a juice fast day.
- The family divided along the yellow mustard vs dijon mustard lines and as usual Josh was the only one on the yellow-mustard side BUT there was no smooth dijon mustard so our pretzels were, to an extent, unrequited.
We ate the pretzels while learning (re-learning) to play mahjong. This was surprisingly complex. More on that later.
