Pretzel

The other day I wanted to make pretzels. As it is quite a traditional food, naturally my first thought was to open the Horváth Ilona Cookbook to check what she says about it. To my surprise there was no recipe for any kind of pretzel. Not a good start, Ica… not a good start.

So then I picked up my Elfelejtett magyar konyha book, as I remembered there’s a pretzel recipe in there. I chose to follow that one. In this book there are some fun facts about each food.

According to the author, the pretzels were originally simple circles and not the complicated form we know. So I decided that it is much easier to make that instead of the complicated version.

I like to make yeast dough because it is like a hug you can eat. First I warmed the milk a little in the microwave. Be careful not to heat it too much, as milk that is too hot can kill the yeast. Add the sugar, so the yeast has something to eat. Then add the yeast to the sugary milk. Let it rise.

Measure the flour, the butter, the eggs and the salt. Add the yeast mix and knead it to be a smooth dough.

I knead these kinds of doughs by hand for a very long time until I realised that the stand mixer can do the work for me.

When I started to make them, as I mentioned above, I wanted to make them as simple circles, because that is much easier. I read further in the book: Jewish bakers brought pretzels to America, where they turned into bagels!

So I wanted to make the crispy circle pretzels, but I didn’t want to fill two baking trays, so they became a bit thick.

In the end they turned out to be great bagels, as you can see in the picture. They are great with cream cheese.