I’ve spent years working on my pretzels. Now we proudly sell them in our Pizza shops. We don’t give out our recipe but here are some tips I learned along the way.
Lye: we use a 4% solution at room temperature. Never boil lye. Longer dips in lye will darken the pretzel more. So you need to note how long each pretzel is in the lye bath.
Dough Hydration: total dough hydration should be around 58-60%. If you use butter you should include the amount of water in your butter into your total hydration. Higher hydration pretzel are easier to roll out but the are harder to dip and they will give you less “chew”.
Par-freeze before you bake: 10-15 minutes in the freezer helps with the lye dipping process.
Don’t proof after you shape the pretzel. Your yeast and oven spring should do all the work.
Use a starter to prolong shelf life.
Double your batches and freeze the cooked pretzels. They can be better after a second reheat in the oven.
If you’re using lye and cant get the color you want it is your oven. Convection ovens cook much better and help brown the pretzel. We now bake our pretzels on our pizza conveyor oven.
We use a 12% protein flour, similar to a German 550 type flour (pulling this from memory so don’t yell at me if the # is wrong). A lot of sources say to use high protein bread flour. We find this to not be ideal for our recipe / process.
Malt: get some malt in your recipe. There are a few options online. Make sure to include any syrup style malts in your total hydration.
Lastly, don’t pay attention to the “I’m from Germany” or “When I visited Germany” crowd on the internet that think they know everything about Pretzels. Most of them couldn’t bake a quality pretzel from scratch if their life depended on it. You do you!
Hope this helps someone, happy baking!!
by xwlh05g
25 Comments
Oh damn.
Ok, well done. Now tell us where to go to get them yummy things!
I don’t always crush my pretzels, but when I do, I wear black vinyl gloves
Here’s your fresh pretzel. Now I promise this won’t hurt a bit.
*Snaps left glove* *Snaps right glove*
That’s looking amazing! Great work!!
As a fellow pretzel baker i see two things.
your shaping is exceptional, it is so hard to get that shape just right.
the crackle on that crust looks amazing. is that related to the par freeze? i get decent crackle but not like that!
why do you need gloves to touch bread youve made? it’s so creepy I hate it.
Hell yeah! Will done!
Mission accomplished!
They look delicious!
I for real thought this was a black guy then I was like where are his nails.
Then realized he was wearing gloves. 🤦♂️
The crushing I’ll forgive. I won’t forgive you dropping it like a rock instead of eating it immediately.
Holy shit. I love pretzels. Looks so good.
Why on earth would you touch food with gloves hands. I could not focus on the goodness of the bloody pretzel.
I never thought of trying to make my own pretzels… This post has given me a new mission… dang, and now I’m hungry too!
I feel like this pretzel is getting auctioned off
Is this fetish stuff
🥵🥵🥵
I thought the nigga had frost bite at first
4% lye solution is the only way to go. They look awesome!
Also, thanks for the tip on the 15min par-freeze, I usually leave mine one-hour uncovered in the fridge before dipping but your way can have them ready by the time my home oven preheats!
Please don’t touch food like this. It’s gross.
r/dontputyourdickinthat
Native Bavarian approved.
I may not bake a good pretzel, but I sure as hell recognise one!
Dip it god dammit!
Looks heavenly.
Nice looking Bretzen, saying that as a Bavarian, but what’s with the gloves? That’s really off putting, as if the bread was poisonous.