Why boil pretzels

If I want to freeze the pretzel uncooked should I give the bath before freeze or before bake , if so should let desferiste first? Thank you. Hey Julie! I stumbled upon this page while browsing, after making a batch of pretzels my own buffalo chicken pretzel bites recipe..

My question, instead of using a buttermilk base i chose to use cream of chicken.. I wonder if your recipe would work by doing that? Hmm…someone else left that comment below too! I like boiling instead of dipping because it does get the pretzel to puff up and rise really quickly. What state were the pretzels in before you dipping them frozen, had time to rise, etc? We made the dough with a mixer it was prepackaged and we added yeast and water.. We did the same.

The water was really hot as I remember it. We constantly changed the water so that it was as hot as we could stand to touch and dip. I did wonder why they were boiled in baking soda, makes perfect sense now. You even make this sound really easy, I might just have to attempt to make some myself…. And mine turned out fine that way. And they had that chew I love in pretzels. I think I boiled them too long, they have a funny almost eggy taste.

Oh no! The boiling is very VERY brief. Dipping may work—but the solution should be hot when you do it so that the soda is dissolved! My wife thought it was insert crude remark!

I just made the most perfect pretzels and I used the dipping method. You have to boil the baking soda in the water until it is fully disolved and then let it sit until it is warm.

Can I boil them the day or hours beforehand? Lisa — you can boil and partially bake them, then freeze them until party time! Really interesting!

I made these with my daughter last night practicing for 4-H — this is the year to make pretzels for the fair! We made 6 with the dipping, 2 without. The dipped ones did definitely look nicer in color. BUT — it puffed up the pretzels so much that they lost the pretzel shape and looked more like blobs after baking.

Any ideas to combat this? I will say that our recipe said to boil the pretzels in the water 2 minutes — quite a bit longer than you suggest here, so maybe that contributed to the over-puffing?

Yes, I would think that letting the pretzels boil in the baking soda for too long would make them too puffy! Being the food nerd that I am, I just researched this. Soft pretzels have to be boiled in baking soda before they're baked via Taste of Home.

Introducing the pretzel to the alkaline solution changes the pH level of the dough. As a result, the pretzel darkens better in the oven if this step weren't taken, pretzels would have the same color as plain bagels and the soft pretzel develops its crispy — yet chewy — texture for which it's known.

Typically a half cup of baking soda is used in two quarts of water for the solution. They don't need to be boiled for long — 10 to 15 seconds should do the trick. Also, the pretzel is much darker than a bagel. These facts are not coincidental. Browning at low temperatures, such as the kind a pretzel or bagel are exposed to during baking, happens because of Maillard reactions. These reactions happen in the presence of water and certain amino acids.

They are also aided by an alkaline environment. So if you baked the pretzel long enough to get the brown color on the outside without the alkaline environment, you would impact the texture significantly. It's a good point.

There are a lot of pretzel recipes that don't call for the baking soda and just have a light-brown coloration as well. For me, a proper pretzel will be that thoroughly dark brown, and a bagel will be somewhat lighter.

Though I'd bet a pretzel bagel with salt coating is someone's specialty treat somewhere. Already a subscriber? Log in. Get the print magazine, 25 years of back issues online, over 7, recipes, and more.

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