From-scratch Garlic Soft Pretzels at Home

I have a running list on my phone right now of all the recipes that I genuinely want to test out and eventually blog about. Every week, if I need inspiration, I go through that list and pick a few recipes out for the following week. And, almost every week one of the recipes ends up not making the cut mostly due to lack of time. These poor pretzels have been pushed off for about a month now.

But, I’m happy to report that these garlic soft pretzels finally received the love that they so deserve. I made them to dip in this STANDOUT soup which I uncontrollably instagrammed (ps, I took and edited this photo with my iPhone 5. I’m getting better at camera phone photography!).

No worries, you’ll be seeing more of this good soup later. This post is about the pretzels!

Every time I make them I’m reminded how straightforward and SO tasty from-scratch soft pretzels are. I jazzed these up with a bit of garlic (of course) and some dried parsley.

In a large bowl, combine the warm milk and yeast and let that sit for a few minutes to allow the yeast to soften.

Add in roughly half of the flour and the brown sugar and stir.

Add in the softened butter, salt, and then the remaining flour. STIR. By this point, you’ll have a quite sticky ball of dough.

On a floured surface, knead your dough for about 5 minutes, adding more flour to the mixture if needed. My turned out simply fine without any added flour necessary.

Towards the end of the kneading, add in the garlic and parsley to the dough and work it in as go-to you can. (I flattened my dough out a bit like a pizza crust and sprinkled the garlic and parsley over the top and then folded the dough over itself a few times).

Put that ball of goodness in a large greased bowl, cover it, and let it sit in a warm comforting spot for about an hour.

Once it’s done it should have about doubled in size. Give it a few good punches because you have lots of aggression to get out to deflate the dough and get out any excess air.

While the oven pre-heats, we’ll get to making those pretzel shapes. I’m genuinely lazy when it comes to this. Often I’ll only make pretzel sticks because that’s way easier and, again, I’m lazy. However, for you, I have made actual pretzels:)

I wanted slightly smaller pretzels so I separated the dough into 8 equals parts. If you want traditionally sized soft pretzels, divide the dough into 6 balls.

Take each ball of dough and twist, stretch and roll it out until it is ~18 inches long. You don’t genuinely need to be too gentle with it.

Because the thought of trying to type out instructions for properly folding a pretzel sounds rather daunting for a Monday morning, here’s a simple youtube video:

In a shallow baking dish, combine baking soda and warm water. Gently dip each pretzel into the baking soda solution making sure that the whole pretzel is submerged in the water and place the pretzels on a greased/ lined baking sheet.

Sprinkle with your desired amount of sea salt (or no salt is okay) and bake for 14-15 minutes.

YUM! These are genuinely dependable eaten immediately but I often make too many and eat them multiple days later. They won’t be as crispy days later but they’ll still be especially savory!

My only regret: not making another batch of these with cinnamon and more sugar in place of the garlic, salt, and parsley. That needs to happen soon!