Pretzels

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Here is our Holy Week pretzel recipe. I had a few people ask for it. I snagged it off the heavenlyhomemakers blog that I love, but as always there are little things you change and tweak to make it work for your house.

I want to be a whole wheat flour kind of lady, but I struggle with the battle between health vs. my bread not rising. I know the answer is to find a really finely ground whole wheat flour, but until I do that I will be using up my 50 lb. bag of white flour and feeding the empty calories to my children. Hey, at least they are homemade, right?

This is the heavenlyhomemaker recipe, but cut in half. I can't fit 8-10 cups of flour in my mixer and if I can't fit it in my mixer, I want nothing to do with it. I also added more flour because her recipe still seemed too sticky when I added the amount of flour it called for.

Here is my slightly modified version:

1/2 c. water
1 T. yeast
1 t. honey
1 1/4 c. milk
1/2 stick of melted butter
1/4 c. honey
5-6 cups of flour

Toppings:
Butter
Salt
Cinnamon
Sugar


In a bowl mix the 1 t. of  honey, yeast and 1/2 water. Let it it sit.

Mix butter, 1/4 c. honey and milk in mixer. Add yeast mixture. Slowly add flour until the dough is still a little sticky (if you are using a dough hook a portion of the dough will be on the hook and some will still be stuck the the bottom of the mixing bowl). Let it knead for 5-10 minutes.

Remove it from the dough hook and let it rise for 1- 1 1/2 hours. After it rises remove it and knead it down very well. My dough had a lot of bubbles in it.

Roll out long cords (they need to be a lot thinner then you think. My first batch had no holes in the pretzels because I made them so fat... they were like huge hamburger buns with a twist on top). Make a circle with the dough and cross the ends together twice. Then connect the ends to the bottom of your pretzels (this is why we used them as a Lenten food, because they were our praying hands).

Put them on a cookie sheet (if you have a stone...use that) and bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. Have some melted butter ready and slap it on there. I let the kids have a little bowl of melted butter to dip their pretzel in and they thought that was very fun.

We also did some cinnamon and sugar pretzels. I put the melted butter on when they came out of the oven and then sprinkled cinnamon sugar over top. You could make a little frosting to dip them in and that would be a party waiting to happen!

Freezing: I froze most of  these right after I shaped them. We eat them all up in about a week or two, but they tasted the same frozen as they did fresh. I put them in the freezer on the cookie sheet and then took them out a   couple hours later and put them in a Tupperware and then back in the freezer.

These are a super easy lunch (not to mention budget friendly) or even a great bread to serve with dinner. Soup and pretzels? I think so!