Bretzeln – A German specialty

As Oliver made beer from scratch, this of course calls out for making our own Bretzeln as well. Bretzeln come from Southern Germany and for some reason they do not master the skills in the Northern part. So I might be up for a challenge. Time to practice Bretzeln baking skills. Since I do not posses these skills I had to do a bit of Googling and found a recipe in German.

This is my very first attempt.

Ingredients:
500 gram flour/3 cups
7 gram dry yeast
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
350 ml lukewarm milk
1 1/2 liter water
2 table spoons bicarb/baking soda
rock salt to cover

Oven temperature: 180 degrees
Oven time: 25-30 minutes

Looking at the ingredients I find it amazing that (almost) the same ingredients can turn into bread, pizza, pasta, pie or just by adding more ingredients also in cakes and cookies. All with very different tastes. In this recipe just milk and the boiling in salt water make it into bretzeln.

Let’s start:

Mix it together with a dough mixer until it forms into a ball, I use a hand mixer for this.

In the meantime boil 1 1/2 liter of water and add 2 table spoons of salt.

Take them out of the water, let the water drip off and put them on baking paper. Traditionally you add rock salt, but as I like cheese, I added some cheese on some of them.

After 25-30 minutes in the preheated oven (at 180 degrees) they look, and taste, almost professional.

Well, maybe I need to practice a little more to get the color and the shape right, but hey, it was only my first attempt! And they almost tasted like we know them.