It’s fair to say my amazon wishlist is pretty much always full of cooking related books. One in particular that I’d been hoping to receive for some time, was Crust by Richard Bertinet, which I got for Christmas last year.

Since then I’ve dipped into it a couple of times, but always ended up reading more of the information chapters in there, than actually baking anything! I finally decided that I’d give his Pretzel recipe a go. Well it was a toss up between Pretzels and Sourdough, but seeing as a Sourdough starter takes a long time, that can wait (after all it’s been about 3 years since I decided that I’d give the Sourdough from the Moro cook book a go, and that’s still not happened!)

Quite a few of the breads in Crust use two doughs, that is you first make one dough that you leave for a long time to prove and then incorporate this into your final dough. All of my bread making to date, bar making a Biga on a cookery course 3 or 4 years ago, has been using a single dough. That said there’s nothing overly complicated about it. For the first dough you just mix the flour, yeast, salt and water together, work it and then leave it for at least 6 hours or overnight in the fridge.

Then for the actual dough you take some of the first dough and incorporate this into a second dough, made of flour, yeast, caster sugar, salt, butter, milk and water. This just needs a good mixing and then to rest for 1 hour.

 

Once it’s rested the dough needs separating up into 100g pieces, these are then rolled out and plaited/folded into the pretzel shape seen above. This is where practice no doubt makes perfect. I didn’t quite have the patience to flick back in the book to find out the best way to separate up the dough and as a result my pieces, whilst the right weight, weren’t overly smooth. The rolling out is something I found quite easy, but that’s probably thanks to making so many batches of Grissini from Mark Hix’s Baking book (a Christmas present from the year before!)

I would disagree with the recipe saying to roll out each piece to 20cm, as I found 30-40cm worked better for making the pretzel shape. I also had problems with getting the ends to stay put.

Anyway once the pretzels are shaped, you brush them with a salted egg wash and leave for 45-60 minutes. Then just before you put them in a very hot oven, apply another coat of egg wash and sprinkle with rock salt. About 12 minutes and they’re done.

 

 

I’ll definitely be giving these another go, hopefully practice will make perfect with the shaping as you can see above the final product has lost it’s shape somewhat. Other than that the left over first dough will be making the base for a nice pizza tomorrow night.