Pretzel Rolls

First of all, this recipe is kneaded in the food processor—how easy is that? Add your bread flour, yeast, salt, and 1 teaspoon sugar to the bowl of your processor. Pulse to blend that together, then leave the machine running. Slowly pour your 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of hot (but not boiling, don’t wanna kill the yeast!) water through the feed tube, until a dough forms. Then let the machine run for a minute to knead the dough. (I have a 5-cup processor, and I do sometimes start and stop the machine in 20-second increments, because I’ve overheated my processor before making this recipe. However, if you have a bigger processor, no worries, and I have made it successfully plenty of times in mine.)

Once your dough is nice and elastic, you should grease a bowl and put the dough in there, flipping the dough ball a couple of times so it gets coated with the grease. Cover it with plastic wrap and a towel and put it in a WARM spot in your kitchen. My kitchen must be cold, because I always have to wait about an hour for my dough to double, but you might see results in about 45 minutes.

Once your dough has doubled, you should put a little bit of flour in a jelly roll pan. Uncover your dough bowl, pick up the dough ball a few inches, then drop it to “punch” the dough down. Spend a few minutes pushing it around with your fingers to knead it—it doesn’t need (knead? haha) a lot, but you can tell that the dough will seem more elastic and less sticky after kneading. Divide your dough ball into 8 pieces (to me, this is the hardest part—I can never make them perfectly even!) and shape each piece into a roll-shaped ball. If you get them to be perfectly round, you might want to flatten them a little bit, but I don’t worry too much about perfection here. Put the rolls onto that floured baking sheet, cover it with your towel from before, and leave them for another 30 minutes.

Now we’re ready to give them that nice, chewy soft pretzel crust. I have never made bagels personally, but I would imagine that the treatment is the same. Go ahead and preheat the oven to 375F. Get a clean baking sheet or jelly roll pan and cover it with parchment (SmittenKitchen uses cornmeal but I never found it necessary). Boil 8 cups of water. While you wait for the water to boil, go ahead and lightly beat one egg white in a small bowl, and get your pastry brush and your sea salt out. When the water is boiling, add your baking soda and remaining 2 tablespoons of sugar. The water will foam up very quickly, but just for a few seconds—still, use a bigger pot! You don’t want to make a mess. You should add the rolls, 4 at a time, to the pot, and let them sit there for 30 seconds, then flip them (I like to use a big strainer spoon) and do 30 seconds on the other side. Once they’re done, put them (right side up) onto your parchment-covered baking sheet. Repeat with the other 4 rolls.

At this point, you’re going to want to use a sharp, preferably serrated knife to cut Xs into the top of each roll. I’ve seen pretzel rolls that are far prettier than mine, so I don’t work too hard, but it does look nice on your finished product. Then use your pastry brush to glaze the rolls with egg white, then top each with sea salt or other coarse salt to your liking.

Finally, we’re ready to bake! Pop these into the oven for 25 minutes (they should be brown and smell delicious). Let them cool on a cooling rack for 10 minutes, then dig in! I like to eat them warm, or cut them like hamburger buns to make an awesome ham and cheese sandwich (I don’t like mustard but something tells me most people would like it in this combo). They don’t keep very well, because the salt kind of makes them squishy. If I have any left over, I put them in a loosely closed paper bag and eat them all up the next day!