Homemade Pretzels (Almost Auntie Anne’s!)

My Sunday baking continues. Major hit this week from a Pinterest find that led me to YammiesNoshery.com and her copycat recipe for Auntie Anne’s  pretzels. It’s a little dangerous to have this recipe to be honest. If you can’t find me, I’ll be in a homemade pretzel induced food coma in the corner from over-indulgence! Thankfully I recognized that this might be the case and decided to make just a half batch (yielding 6 pretzels, plus a mini one).

I’ll let you check out Yammie’s site for the recipe, since I didn’t change it a bit besides halfing the recipe and using a little less salt. Here’s what my process looked like though. Some tips follow. Overall they were easier than I thought they would be.

Here’s another link to the recipe. A few things I learned:

• I really wish I had a KitchenAid standmixer for kneading dough. It’s definitely doable by hand, but requires 10 minutes of kneading. One day it will be mine! My problem right now is storage space.
• Roll them out thin. You can see in my step by step pictures, I thought I had gotten it pretty thin, but they still baked up a little thicker than Yammie’s (and Auntie Anne’s). They still tasted awesome though!
• When doing the baking soda/water dip, I found that rolling and shaping a few out at a time and then dipping them was more efficient and less messy.
• If you are baking them in separate batches. (I only baked 3 at a time.) Roll, shape, and dip the ones you’re going to bake and then put them in the oven. While they’re baking roll, shape, and dip the next batch. This way they don’t have too much of a chance of the dough raising again in between. 
• I don’t care for a lot of salt on my pretzels, so I did not salt them (except for what was in the dough) before putting them in the oven. I did do a light dusting of sea salt after I dipped them in butter.

Seriously, these are so good. My husband and I polished 4.5 of them off the first day. My son doesn’t really care for bread, so it was all on the two of us to eat them. I know, he must not really be my child!