Making Pretzels

Melissa and I went to the Dorothy Lane Cooking School tonight and we made pretzels. It was a really easy recipe to make. The recipe was for the Bavarian type pretzels. Melissa did the kneading since I can't with my bad wrist. I think when I do these at home I will used my kitchen aid mixer with the dough hook to knead it but will have to be careful not to over knead it. We then rolled cut the dough into 12 pieces and let the dough rest for about 5 minutes then rolled each piece on the table until they were long rolls fatter in the middle and skinny on the ends. We didn't really get the ends skinny enough so most of ours turned out kind of fat without the normal pretzel holes. Didn't matter they were still delicious. The only odd thing that we had to do with them is to dip them in food grade lye and water mixture. You have to do that in order to get the browning typical of the Bavarian pretzel. They put all of our pretzels on a large rack that went into a walk in oven. The rack is attached to the top of the oven and spins around while it cooks! It was really cool. It took about 15 minutes to cook in the commercial oven. We had some cheese spreads and mustard that we could eat with them. I had a pimento cheese spread that I liked. Melissa liked the chive spread. I didn't eat the mustard dip that they made because I don't like mustard. Any way we had a great time making them and we went to the Dorothy Lane Market afterward and bought some of the items to make them on our own.

This is Melissa kneading the dough. I wasn't supposed to get her in the picture but I guess I did.

This is the picture of the whole class making the pretzels. I believe this is when we were dipping the pretzels in the lye/water mixture and salting the tops.

These are our pretzels on the baking pan.

This is all of the pretzels on the rack that goes into the oven.

This is our teacher putting the rack in the oven.

These are the pretzels in the oven and the rack is actually spinning around.

These are the baked pretzels! They smelled so good.

This is when we got to enjoy our pretzels. They served it with some beer but I didn't like it very much.

Today was my one year anniversary as a civilian worker. I am now off probation! Guess that means I can be bad LOL. I got a nice surprise yesterday when I was given this award it was from the Director of our squadron. I was recognized for all the work I have done getting the testing program under way and training all the Airmen. I also received an 8 hour time off award so that is very nice! That's it for tonight!