- Hey dudes.
I'm Hilah and today on Hilah Cooking
I'm making soft pretzels.
I made pimento cheese a couple days ago and it got me thinking
about soft pretzels because what goes great with pimento cheese?
Soft pretzels.
They're like this.
Soft pretzels are super great to make for a football game or
sports game or something that when you're going to have people
over to your house drinking some beer feed 'em soft pretzels.
They'll give you a high five.
(upbeat music)
- Alright, the dough for soft pretzels is actually super easy
especially if you have a stand mixer.
If not, you can do my hand, knead by hand.
You're gonna start out with some yeast dough so
I've got some hot water.
I like to start slightly hotter then it should be.
It should be between like 95 and 115°F.
Slightly warmer than body temperature.
I'm gonna add some brown sugar and if your waters too hot it'll
kill the yeast but I want to get a little bit warmer than normal
so I can solve this brown sugar.
You should be able to stick your finger in it and it feels warm
but it's not gonna burn you by any means.
Gonna add a little packet of yeast.
So yeast is a living organism
and when it's sorta dormant when
you buy it in a little dry pouch like this and then when you add
it to the warm sugary water it wakes it up and we're gonna pour
this, sprinkle it in over the top.
And then, we're gonna let it sit for five minutes and that's the
step that's called proofing the yeast.
Basically your proofing that it's still alive
and it's not dead.
So we're gonna let it sit for about five minutes.
We're gonna come back it should look nice and like white and
foamy kind of like the head of the really nice beer which
reminds me, I should go get some beer while I'm waiting.
Okay, five minutes later, you can see this yeast is just like
(mimics explosion).
It looks a little bit like pond scum.
But it's perfectly natural and it's making bubbles and actually
like so yeast eats the sugar, if you didn't know this,
yeast eats the sugar and produces carbon dioxide and
that's what makes the bubbles
and that's what makes bread rise.
So you can see it's already doing it now.
Gettin' high off that CO2 man.
Just kidding, it's not a drug.
Okay, I'm gonna add a little bit of beer.
If you don't want to use beer you can use water but I use
about a half a cup of a lager style beer like a light.
Whoa.
Add some soft butter,
couple tablespoons of butter and
some bread flour.
It's really important to use bread flour.
You can buy it most stores where they sell regular flour,
bread flour has a higher gluten protein content so it makes
breads like more elastic and stringy and stuff like that.
I'm like look at me, I'm a gluten molecule.
What is that?
Okay, so we're gonna add, and I apologize to y'all Europeans
out there but I took your great German pretzel recipe and I made
it not metric so I don't know how much this weighs so
I'm using about 3 1/4 cup of flour.
Start with a little bit less if you want and then
you can always add more.
That's better, usually with breads and things it's better to
have it be a little wet and then a little more flour than have it
be too dry and then have to work your way back.
And then we're just gonna knead this for about five minutes.
Oh, I'm gonna add some salt too.
Sorry.
(Bavarian music)
And as it goes, you know, you want it to pull
all together into a ball.
If it seems like it's gonna be too wet you can add a little bit
more flour like a tablespoon at a time or if it's too dry and
it's not coming together you can
add a little bit of water the same way.
But give it a couple minutes to
see if it comes together on its own first.
Okay, this took about 5 1/2 minutes.
I didn't have to add any flour just kind of let it go until
it's formed the ball like I said.
And now, it feels soft and it should feel cool but when you
touch is not sticky like sticking to my hands at all.
It's not leaving any kind of
residue so now we got to let it rise.
I've got a little bit more butter here I'm just gonna
grease up this big squishy ball
and put it back in this bowl.
You want it to be able to rise at slightly warmer than room
temperature for about 30 minutes.
So we'll come back and show you how that's done and then we'll
actually make the pretzels.
30 minutes later it has risen like a boner in the morn.
Okay, we're gonna divide this into eight little pieces.
Look at that, it's so pretty.
Beautiful.
If you want you could do like pretzel bites or like one big
pretzel or whatever.
I'm gonna to make some regular sized pretzels.
Throw those over there.
We just gonna use one piece at a time and I find it's usually
easier not to flour your surface. A lot of times when you're
rolling out dough you want to flour it but because were trying
to stretch this out to a 24-inch snake, be an awesome name for a
porno, you kind of are stretching it a little so the
flour almost makes it like too slick like you want it to grip
the counter a little bit.
And for traditional German soft pretzels shape you want to leave
this like the belly of the snake, the belly of the beast,
a little bit fatter than the ends.
So we got our snake, take the two ends, flip them up, twist
them together, once, twice and then down like that.
Okay, now for the lye bath.
If you know anything about pretzels you know that they get
that, and bagels too, they get that like shiny golden brown
crust from a little quick dip in some lye water.
Lye is very caustic, it's very alkaline, it can be a little bit
dangerous if you don't know what you're doing and it's actually
really hard find at a grocery store
so this baking soda and
baking soda is also alkaline but not so much as lye but if you
put it on a little foil lined tray like this put in your oven
at 250° for about an hour
it makes it more alkaline and
closer to the pH of lye.
So that's all I've done here.
I'm gonna like whisk this into
some warm water just to dissolve it.
Try not to get any lumps.
If you stick your fingers it in it feels kind of like slippery
and soapy and that's how people used to make soap
was mixing lye with oil or something like beef tallow.
Prairie soap.
Okay, I'm gonna dip my pretzels into this little lye solution
one at a time.
Kinda let 'em soak for about 10 seconds on each side.
Oh, they're floating, how cute.
One, two, nine, ten.
One, two, and
drip it off.
Put it back on the sheet and then while it's still wet from
your fake lye bath, sprinkle it with a little coarse salt.
I'm just using some coarse kosher salt.
They actually make like what's called pretzel salt that you can
buy it like gourmet stores like spice stores
but I don't have that.
Kosher salt works totally fine.
Okay, we're gonna keep doing this with all the pretzels. Yay!
So now I'm gonna start my oven pre-heating to 475 while I let
these rest for another 30 minutes
just uncovered just gonna like
let the skin to dry out a little bit
and it's gonna give them a nice
little crispy crust and make sure you wash your hands.
Definitely, definitely feeling
that on my little bitten down, bloody cuticles.
Okay, see you in 30 minutes.
Not literally.
Okay, another little rise and our yeast has done its job.
Pretzels are nice and puffy
and we're gonna put them in the oven.
We're gonna kill the yeast.
We're gonna say stop that, yeast.
Thanks for your work but you're dying now.
We're going to put them in 475 for 8 to 12 minutes.
I've got my racks arranged like one sort of in the middle and
one a little bit higher than that.
So we're gonna pop them in there and then rotate about halfway
through and then we can eat some pretzels.
I can't wait.
(light music)
My house smells (censored) amazing right now.
Oh my God, I can't wait to eat these.
I'm gonna eat them with some pimento cheese.
If you want to check out the video, I just put up a couple
days ago, I'll put a link right up here, over there on these
sides and then also if you want to see how I learned how to make
soft pretzels and how it ties in to Texas,
check out my series
Hilah's Texas Kitchen that I did a couple years ago.
Oh my God!
I'm so excited.
Look at this.
Yes.
Super soft and doughy on the inside and
like crunchy on the outside.
Weeping inside my heart is weeping with excitement.
Mmmm.
Homemade soft pretzels are gonna to blow your mind.
I hope you make these for your friends on your sports games or
your cookouts or your birthday parties or your Oktoberfest
whatever the hell you do
recipe's always available at HilahCooking.com.
Thanks so much, don't forget to subscribe.
You can click right down here and I will see next week.
Bye.
Want to try some pretzels?
- (babbling)
- Chef Baby!
See what you think.
- Ha.
Mama.
- You want Mama to have a pretzel.
That's very nice.
- Daddy.
- You want Daddy to have a pretzel, too?
(cameraman laughing)