Eggless Baking : Home made Soft Pretzel and Diwali Wishes to All my Readers

Wishing all my Readers "A Very Very Happy Deepavali" the Indian festival of lights.

These were her words when R came back from her school the other day : "Wow! U made them?? I knew U made something like bread I could smell it. Do U have Cheese sauce/dip with it???? And in reply to her Cheese dip question when I said sorry I didn't had any yellow cheese in the fridge, in the mean while she had her first bite, she goes "these are good BUT Aunt A's are better. YES! Auntie Anne's from the mall, we all have eaten it some or the other point and O'course they come with the DIP, and I didn't had any. BUT wait, the moment she had few more bites and she goes but I love the salt part, actually these are REALLY GOOD. She polished off two. I did melted a cheese slice for her, as on the name of yellow cheese that was the only thing I had but the moment it got off the heat it kind of got hard & not melted any more. So note to myself : next time I make these make sure cheese dip is ready first & I'm sure then Mom's Pretzels will be best and not next to the best.

Now before jumping to the recipe, few days back I found this blog called applecrumbles & the post I landed up on was about summer rolls, yes ! the kind U make using rice paper wrappers, I read it because it was a good co-incidence that couple of days back only I had bought a pack of rice paper rolls & since then they were are sitting on my counter top. No, I didn't made those but instead at the end of the post she had mentioned that Next Week "we will be making pretzels, want to make pretzels with us ?" At that moment itself I emailed her & by the night she emailed me the recipe. She and one of her friend are following a book called "Fusion of Food + Friends" and every week they make one recipe from that book. Now, I got the recipe and before jumping to baking I did little online search, and it was little as I checked first two links of the search result & I was set to go. Plus one more thing I did do little extra search about Yeast also but that's a topic for some other day.

Original recipe was using 4 cups of flour that means lot of pretzels. Now my main problem while baking is,  that most of the recipes are for big batches, so I spent some time to 1/4th it. I wrote everything on paper & while getting the dough ready I messed up(4 calls in time span of 20 minutes, all imp. plus a toddler keep coming back to remind me I no like pretzel, Didi(big sis) like it) and pour half cup of extra water to the dough. Added more flour etc. to fix it. So, my messed up recipe yielded me 5 pretzels of around 5" radius. Now to the recipe...

Here's what I used :
for dough :

• 1 tsp. Rapid Rise Yeast/Instant Active Dry Yeast
• 3 tsp. Honey
• 5 TBSP. Warm Milk
• 1/2 cup Warm Water
• 1 cup + 6 TBSP. Bread Flour
• 1/4 Cup whole wheat flour(atta)
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1&1/2 TBSP. EVOO(extra virgin olive oil)

for water bath :

• 4 TBSP. Baking Soda
• 2 Cup hot water

for topping(optional) :

• Coarse Sea Salt
• Melted Butter

What I did :

1. I used kitchen aid stand mixer to make the dough but one can easily do it with hands.
2. Mix salt flour & yeast together. Add rest of the ingredients from the dough list. Knead it to the consistency where the dough is no more sticky.
3. Rub some oil on the dough ball & keep it in some big oiled bowl. Cover & let it sit in some warm area of your kitchen for at least 1 & 1/2 hour or until it get almost double in size. Mine was sitting for almost two hours & it was more than double after rising.
4. Preheat the oven to 400 degree. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper & lightly spray it with cooking oil/spray.
5. Getting water bath ready : Heat the water  & dissolve baking soda in it. Be careful when U add soda to the hot water, it gonna get all bubbly & sprinkly.
6. Take the dough on a lightly floured surface divide it into 5 equal parts.
7. Now take one dough ball & roll it into a big rope and shape it like a pretzel. Here on this blog U can see step by step pictures or I'm sure U can find many videos about how to roll a pretzel on U Tube or learn it from the experts : make a trip to your local mall & have a live demo of how to roll a pretzel in Auntie Anne's shop.
8. Once the pretzels are shaped take them one by one & give them a hot soda bath. Gently drop one pretzel at a time into the bath, count to 10 & using slotted spoon take it out & place it on the ready baking sheet.
9. Sprinkle some coarse sea salt if U wish.
10. Bake them for around 10 minutes or till they get brown on the top. Mine took good 15 minutes.

11. When come out brush them with some melted butter.

Note : I used 1 qt. small pot for soda bath, if using big pot double the quantity of water & soda so that there is enough water for pretzels to float in.

These were good look wise and taste wise, very soft from inside, but they were not as chewy as store bought ones are. That could be because of I used milk & olive oil in it but I'm not sure. But as the overall result was so good I think it's a keeper recipe.

Now coming back to the original recipe it used :

• water only & no milk,
• active dry yeast (so proofing is required)
• white sugar instead of honey
• melted butter instead of EVOO
• all purpose flour instead of bread flour & whole wheat flour
• Kosher salt instead of sea salt

Idea of using milk & honey instead of water & white sugar was an inspiration from this & this blog.

These delicious Pretzels are on their way to Susan's Yeastspotting.

And yes! I just noticed that  's  is missing :-( from the tag which I made at the last moment in hurry. So, please put an imaginary 's to read it as Mom's Pretzel & not Mom Pretzel.