Started with Alton Brown’s recipe (https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/homemade-soft-pretzels-recipe-1948242) and made some adjustments. Also added a few notes regarding prep order and egg wash, as there’s a lot of steps and it’s hard to know which should happen when!
Ingredients:
4 cups all purpose flour, with a half cup in reserve
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoon instant dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water, if you want to be exact 110 F (not hot!)
4 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted
Vegetable oil (for greasing pan)
1 egg yolk, beaten with 1 tablespoon of water for egg wash
2/3 cup baking soda, plus 10 cups of water for boiling pretzels
Dough Assembly:
In a stand mixer with dough hook affixed, add sugar, kosher salt, flour, and instant yeast. Add water and melted butter (best done in a microwave set to 50% power for a minute or so), and turn on mixer on low to combine ingredients. Once ingredients come together, increase speed to medium for about five minutes.
The dough will be ready for the next step when it feels tacky but not sticky. If it feels a little dry, add more water in tablespoon increments (a little goes a long way). If it is too sticky, add a tablespoon of flour at a time. The dough should have just enough gluten to not tear apart when stretched slightly.
Remove from mixer and cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let sit for an hour or until dough has doubled in size.
Baking
Preheat oven to 450 F
Transfer dough to a rolling surface, and form into a roughly square/rectangular shape. I find the easiest way to then cut them to size is with a pizza cutter, but a chef’s knife I’m sure would do fine. Make 8 strips from the resulting dough square. Rolling out each strip to about 2 ft long, and form into pretzel shape. 2 ft seems like a lot, but remember that the dough will expand/rise in the oven and making the shapes too tight will lead to less surface area, which then results in less delicious chewy crust. Just to reiterate, it’s better to err more towards a larger pretzel with bigger loops than a tighter coiled smaller pretzel.
Boil 10 cups of water, and a few minutes before you are ready to start boiling pretzels, add the baking soda (if you are only making 3-4 pretzels, you can halve the amount of water and baking soda, but otherwise use the full 10 cups). Transfer pretzel dough one at a time to the boiling water, cooking for 30 seconds each. Best to have a large spatula on hand to remove pretzels from water. Transfer boiled pretzels to a wire rack on a baking pan.
Beat the egg yolk with a tablespoon of water, and brush egg yolk onto pretzels using a pastry brush - this should be done with the pretzel dough still on the wire rack, as it will help avoid pooling of egg wash. A little egg wash goes a long way. If you over-apply the egg wash, it will pool on the bottom of the pretzel as it cooks, which is something you want to avoid if possible. Right before baking, sprinkle kosher salt liberally on pretzels.
Prepare baking sheet with parchment paper and grease paper with olive oil.
Bake for 12-14 minutes and check for doneness. You want them to be a little on the darker side of golden brown if you want a chewier pretzel, but if you prefer a softer pretzel remove them before they brown too much.
When done transfer to a wire rack to cool. Though it is tempting to eat them warm, I actually prefer their flavor after they’ve cooled for at least an hour. The flavor contrasts develop much more after they’ve cooled.
Note on freezing dough for later - the non-boiled dough freezes well! I don’t think it would hold up as well if boiled first though, so recommend only freezing the raw dough for now.