A Broke Girl's Guide to Being Broke.: Pretzels!

So I LOVE soft pretzels, I also have waaaay too much time on my hands, plus if you buy baking supplies in bulk these are DIRT cheap. I decided to make pretzels a while back and now into my 3rd or 4th batch I have a whole batch that actually look like pretzels. All of the batches taste AMAZING!! They also freeze fantastically.

I used a recipe that I got from Alton Brown on Foodnetwork.com. You can find the recipe here. Below is a rough calculation of the cost for the batch of 11 that I made. It comes to 84 cents for the whole batch!! I didn't calculate the salt or the baking soda, because a whole container is like .59 cents to begin with. And I didn't count the tiny bit of oil to grease the bowl/work surface for rolling. As for the pretzel salt? I dump every package of salt in a package of Super Pretzels (in the freezer section) into a container so I have always had a container of pretzel salt hanging out in my spice cabinet.

Alton's recipe is really simple and easy to follow like all of his recipes if you don't have a digital scale, it is something worth getting if you can find it cheap. I found one for like $10 at Aldi over Christmas and I love it it is great for dividing bread doughs and anything you buy in bulk! A few tips that make Alton's recipe work better for me. I usually try to get about a dozen pretzels out of it even though he says 8. If I divide the dough in 8 pieces my pretzels are WAY too FAT and they don't look nice. I divide the dough evenly on the scale. I think mine weighed about 3 oz apiece, but I don't remember for sure.

The other thing is to let the little balls of dough rest for about 10 min before you start rolling. I can fit 3 or 4 pretzels on my baking pan so I do them in batches. Spread a tiny bit of vegetable oil on the area of your work surface that you are rolling on. Then I roll all of them about the length of my cutting board then when I finish the last one I pick the first one back up and roll it out much longer. The time it takes to sit in between lets the dough calm down and not want to spring back up. Then I for some reason feel the need to do a full twist in the middle rather than just cross over as he says to do. Other than that I follow his recipe exactly and they come out AMAZING!! I let them cool on a cooling rack (while I eat one) then I put them in a gallon ziploc in the freezer. When you freeze them the salt on top stays perfectly. The ones I kept out on the counter had the salt kind of melt back into them. I used to keep most of them out as I intended on eating them quickly. But freezing them works so, great I don't think I will bother keeping them on the counter. Just pop in the microwave for like 35 seconds. I usually do 30 sec and then pop it in a 350 or so oven for a few minutes to crisp it just a bit.