...to Beat Grandma at Cooking: Pretzel Edition.

As far back as I can remember, where there is Grandma Judy, there is food to be eaten.  She likes to cook, and she loves to feed her family.  Growing up, our summer trips to California to visit Grams and Gramps were filled with homemade cinnamon rolls, fresh-baked cookies, and about ten extra pounds of body fat.  Without fail.  So when she found out I had been cooking more, and that I'd be trying out recipes with a higher factor for disaster, she wanted in.  What fun is cooking if you're always using the same old recipes?

So, as the title would seem to suggest, we had a little friendly pretzel-making competition.  We chose a recipe from the Brown Eyed Baker for some delicious-looking soft pretzels.  I gotta give her props for how perfect her pretzels look, both pre- and post-oven.  She made it look easy, which I suppose is the key to a good blog.  I should probably take notes.

I'm here to make it look as exactly as difficult as it is.  You're welcome.

What all good meals start with.

I'll start with the easy stuff, though.  Hard to mess up this first step.  Get a bowl, add the warm water, salt, and sugar.  Sprinkle a packet of active dry yeast on top and wait about five minutes.  It should start to foam a little.  We used the yeast from the fridge, however, and it was not "active dry" yeast, but Grandma Judy said it would be just fine.  I like to think this was the start of the problem (sorry, Grams!), although if we hadn't messed up there, I'm sure we would have elsewhere.

The beginnings of dough.

The next step is to make the dough that will later be transformed into [not so] beautifully shaped soft pretzels.  Throw the butter and flour in with your yeast water and pull out that dough hook attachment for your mixer. You know, the one you probably don't have and even if you do, you've probably never used it or can even picture what it's supposed to look like.  Yep, that's the one.

Okay, so we didn't use the dough hooks.

Amy's dough vs. Grandma's dough (she's beating me so far).

Once you've got your ball of dough, oil up a clean bowl (or the same bowl you've been using because you don't want to do extra dishes later), and let the dough rise for about an hour.  It should nearly double in size!  When you're ready to start forming the pretzels, preheat the oven to 450°.  Let the fun begin.  Put a lot of water and baking soda in a pot and bring to a boil.  This is where you will dip your pretzels after you form them and before you bake them.

Forming these bad boys is the part of the process that I am most impressed by in the pictures on the recipe page.  They look so perfect.  What she doesn't tell you about the dough is that as soon as you roll out that dough snake to as long as it could possibly be, and you let go to start the next one, it bounces right back to where it was five minutes ago, and your pretzel becomes this short, fat blob of dough that barely resembles a pretzel at all.

Divide into "evenly sized" pieces.

Check out that bounce-back!

  

We had to work really hard to get the pretzels to stay in shape when we dunked them in the baking soda water.  The first few fell apart, as you'll see in the pictures below.  I started doing a double twist to hold them together better.  Our slow, methodical baking prep didn't help this part of the process.  The water was a beautiful shade of yellow-brown by the time the last pretzel had been submerged, and I think it contributed to the burnt undertones of the final product.

That's definitely a pretzel.  Right?

After dunking, you're supposed to put them on parchment paper on a baking sheet.  I didn't have parchment paper, because who does?  So straight onto a greased sheet they went, and we brushed them with our egg yolk/water mixture.

Grandma's batch

Amy's Batch (I'm definitely winning at this point)

If you're like me, you like variety.  I didn't want to be stuck with twenty-four salted pretzels.  Especially since the salt I bought wasn't the coarse pretzel salt like the picture on the box made it appear to be.  I ended up trying to crush even bigger salt crystals Grandma had on hand, but like everything we tried to do that day, it wasn't as good as the recipe we were following.  So we created a variety of pretzel flavors.  Cinnamon Sugar.  Garlic.  Parmesan Cheddar.  Salt.  I had high hopes.

Yay, variety!

 And finally it was time to bake them.  By the time those pretzels went in the oven I was exhausted.  I thought I never wanted to make pretzels again.  Ever.  But when they came out of the oven and we tasted them for the first time, I knew it for certain.  

Remember when I mentioned short, fat blobs of dough.  Yeah.

I would, from that point forward, let all my pretzel needs be fulfilled by the professionals.  Thank you mall pretzels shops for existing.

Some actually did resemble pretzels!

Although we both pretty much failed to make good pretzels, I'll call this round Amy-1, Grams-0.  Maybe next time, Grandma!

So. Many. Pretzels.

Update:  Apparently kids aren't as picky, because my little cousins ate up those pretzels like they'd never been to a mall in their lives.  I guess we didn't do so bad after all!