How Kids Make Everything Pretzels

After our success at masking the taste of chicken with our everything bagel tenders, we decided to see if we could learn how to make everything pretzels. As with most kids, we are bread lovers and feel that any homemade bread can stand alone without anything to mask the taste. But there was something so tempting about the idea of making large, soft pretzels for an afternoon snack.

Step 1: Making the Dough for Everything Pretzels

From limited experience, bread usually takes a long time to make. We were worried that this might take all afternoon. However, the recipe that we found was surprisingly quick and only had one hour of letting the dough double.

Step 2: Playing with the Dough

Just think, all of those years of Mom hating playdough time are finally paying off. We will admit, when we were young that stuff ended up everywhere and it took her days to clean it all up. However, I think we can accredit our skills to that wonderful, messy activity.

We cut the dough into 8 equal pieces. Although we are not afraid of sticky dough, we found this to be very easy to shape in comparison with our hamburger buns.

The next steps took us a bit to figure out but ended up being really easy. We rolled out a long piece and realized that this needed to be longer than you would think. Our were about 8 inches.

Next, you fold it over like you are making the letter “P.”

And then you take the tail and wrap it under the curve and pull it through.

If all else fails, just play with them until you have a shape you like!

Step 3: Dipping the Pretzels into Baking Soda Water and Baking

After making your pretzel shape, dip them into warmed baking soda water. Then place them on the baking sheet. This felt a bit odd like they were going to fall apart in the water, but it was easier than it sounded.

Next, we sprinkled them with our everything bagel seasoning and let them rest as we finished the others. I think it is funny to say, “Let them rest” as if they needed some time to recover from all the trauma of rolling and shaping.

As they, ‘rested’ we preheated our oven to 400 degrees and started the cleanup, which is never our favorite part, but there was not that much to do.

The Result of Our Experiment

After a quick ten minutes, the house smelled amazing! Both Dad and Mom came up from their work and wanted to eat them right away. But first, we brushed some melted butter on the top to make them even more appealing.

We had wondered what the baking soda wash was all about, but after biting in, we knew right away that it had created a thin crust on the bread, which made the inside taste even softer.

Although great by themselves, we did try them in a bit of honey mustard, just to get that sweet and salty mix.

Chances are, you will not have any of these everything pretzels leftover, but we found that they were drastically better right out of the oven than the next day.