Everything Bagel Soft Pretzels (2 Ways!)

There was a brief moment in time when I cared very deeply about football. It was my sophomore year of college, and I was thousands of miles away from Wisconsin and anyone who would even remotely care about the Dairy State. Feeling homesick and finding it hard to relate to people whose hometowns never saw temperatures dip below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, I turned to football. I longed to catch a glimpse of people in the stands wearing foam rectangular hats shaped like cheese, and shirtless men whose naked chests were yellow and green from body paint, and bright red from the negative wind chill. There/s just no place like home.

And so, right at the start of the 2010s, I sat alone in my shared dorm room every Sunday to watch a Green Bay Packers game, regardless of the fact that I didn’t yet know all the rules. When Packer fans cheered, I cheered. When booing started, I’d find myself quietly chiming in. As the season progressed and hopes of making it to the playoffs rose, I managed to pick up a few friends along the way who would fill me in on what I still didn’t understand and celebrate wins with me, especially as their favorite teams failed to deliver. At the end of 2010 I considered myself a full-on football fan, even going so far as to order gear for when the Packers, in a game that was quite unforgettable, clinched the NFC title and became eligible for the Super Bowl for the first time in 14 years. It certainly felt incredible to be backing a winning team, and I finally understood why people were so fervent about sports. When you win, directly or indirectly, you feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself. And when you lose, you have a million shoulders to cry on. Plus, trash-talking can be kind of fun (and useful if you’re trying to flirt with a guy in your media class who’s cheering for the other team…but that’s a story for another day). Long story short, the Packers won the Super Bowl that year, and with every celebratory status update I saw on Facebook, I felt closer to home.

Though my interest in football lasted only a few years after that, switching from professional to collegiate along the way, it didn’t hold the same power for me when I moved back home. Football and following the Packers had been my way of staying connected, but once my feet hit frozen soil again, I no longer needed it. And I still don’t to this day, despite the fact that I find myself away from home anew. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t occasionally tune in to a game now and then when I’m channel surfing. And I always, ALWAYS, watch the Super Bowl. Sure, I could say that I actively participate in Super Bowl Sunday because I love the game, but that just wouldn’t be telling the truth. I love watching the Super Bowl for one reason and one reason only: the SNACKS!

I won’t lie, I kind of miss going to live sporting events because the snacks are always on point: nachos covered in creamy, melted cheese, hot dogs/bratwurst with all the fixings, cotton candy the size of a human head, and, of course, soft pretzels, a personal favorite of mine. A few years ago, around this time, I tried my hand at making mini soft pretzels. They were pretty good for a first attempt, and would definitely fit in on any party table, but this year, I wanted to up the ante a little bit. The only thing better than a perfectly-salted soft pretzel? One with everything on it. Or, well, Everything Bagel Seasoning, anyway.

I’m going to level with you for a second: shaping baked goods is not yet my forte. Give me a mold and I’m golden, but if I have to do it freehand? Well, let’s just say some of the first pretzels I attempted to roll and twist and fold into their classic shape came out looking a little…off. That’s why I’m offering you not one, but TWO ways to make these pretzels. If you, like me, struggle with the decoration aspect of baking, consider abandoning the pretzel shape altogether and instead, make pretzel bites! It’s much easier, requires less shaping, and if you’ve got a larger immediate family, there’s plenty more to go around! You just can’t go wrong either way.

Here’s what I love about these Everything Bagel Soft Pretzels: they’re delightfully yeasty and chewy, and with every bite, you get the perfect hits of salt, garlic, onion, and sesame, with the extra crunch of poppy seeds. Best served warm, these pretzels will be gobbled up by halftime!

Everything Bagel Soft Pretzels

What You’ll Need:

• 1 and 1/2 cups lukewarm water

• 1 package active dry yeast

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 1 tablespoon dark brown sugar

• 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

• 3 cups flour, plus 3/4 cups more, and more for dusting the work surface

• 1/2 cup baking soda

• 9 cups water

• Everything Bagel Seasoning (store-bought, or you can make your own!)

Directions:

Place oven racks in the middle and lower third of the oven. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk the yeast and lukewarm water. Let sit for five minutes until foamy and bubbles are on the surface. Whisk in the salt, dark brown sugar, and melted butter.

Working with one cup at a time, add 3 cups of flour to the bowl, mixing thoroughly after each addition with a wooden spoon (the best way to measure flour is by carefully spooning flour into a measuring cup and leveling off the excess with a knife). At this point, the dough will be very sticky. Add more flour to the dough one tablespoon at a time (up to 3/4 cups) and mix well until the dough is no longer sticky to the touch). The dough is ready to be kneaded when it becomes bouncy to the touch.

Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface that has been floured. Using lightly floured fingers, knead the dough for 5 minutes, then shape it into a ball. Let the dough rest, covered with a clean cloth or paper towel, for 10 minutes.

While the dough is resting, fill a heavy-bottomed pot with nine cups of water and add the baking soda. Stir well, then bring the mixture to a boil.

After 10 minutes, uncover the dough and carefully shape it into a 12-inch log with your hands. Using a sharp knife or bench scraper, cut the log into 12 equal pieces.

For Traditional Pretzels:

Roll out a piece of dough into a long rope (about 20 inches long). Take each end of the rope and bring them together so they form a ring, then twist the ends together. Next, bring the ends down so they are touching the inner center of the bottom of the circle, ensuring that everything is attached securely. (Depending on how it goes, you may have to use your fingers to more clearly define the pretzel shape. There’s no shame in it!) Repeat the steps until you have twelve pretzels of equal-ish size.

For Pretzel Bites:

Roll out a piece of dough into a long rope (about 20 inches long). Using a sharp knife or bench scraper, cut the rope into small, bite-sized pieces. Roll each cut piece into a ball. Repeat until all the pieces have been rolled into balls.

When You’re Ready

Once your pretzels or pretzel bites are shaped and ready, drop 1-2 pretzels, or 2-4 pretzel bites, into the pot of boiling baking soda water for 20 seconds. Remove immediately using a slotted spoon or spatula and let excess water drip back into the pot. Gently set the pretzels on one of the prepared baking sheets with parchment paper, spacing them a half-inch apart. Once all pretzels or pretzel bites have been taken out of the water and placed onto the baking sheets, generously sprinkle each with the Everything Bagel Seasoning.

Bake the pretzels in the oven for 12-15 minutes, switching the baking sheets from top to bottom halfway through, until the pretzels are golden brown.

Serve pretzels warm with your preferred dipping sauce (though I eat mine as-is!)

TO STORE: Allows pretzels to cool, then place them in an airtight storage container for up to 3 days. When ready to serve, warm the pretzels in a 350 degree Fahrenheit oven for 5-10 minutes.

SOURCE: Adapted from Sally’s Baking Addiction

Review: Great Jones The Dutchess

More than any appliance or gadget you’ve got in your kitchen, the dutch oven is your workhorse because its versatility makes it perfect for a myriad of cooking tasks. Soup, stew, broth, jam, jelly, bread - you name it, you can make it in a dutch oven. In fact, if you buy nothing else for your kitchen, let the one thing you do splurge on be a dutch oven…and maybe a rubber spatula or two.

I remember the day I first got one, during a routine trip to Marshall’s on Boylston Street in Boston when I wasn’t ready for a long T ride home. It was in October, and around that time every year, as the leaves begin to change and the chill starts to set in, the store switches over from summer offerings to fall fare, complete with ornately-painted plates and charming autumn holiday tchotchkes. It’s all adorable and somewhat unnecessary, but what caught my eye that year was the Cuisinart dutch oven placed front and center on a table in the home section. My interest in food had by that time developed into a passion, and I was watching every cooking show and tutorial I could get my hands on. In many videos, the host had a dutch oven either in front of them or on display on an open shelf in the background. Of course, with massive budgets and the justification for such an expense, the dutch ovens I saw were top-of-the-line Le Creuset, always in perfect condition. Le Creuset dutch ovens are gorgeous enameled cast iron pots, made in France, with brightly-colored exteriors and cream-colored interiors. They’re meant to last you a lifetime, but lifetime-quality ain’t cheap - a brand new 6-quart Le Creuset dutch oven will set you back almost $400.

Still, the 5-quart dutch oven at Marshall’s that fall day was just as beautiful, and with a $60 price tag - a far cry from $400 - I just couldn’t help myself. So that little oven, with its glossy maroon exterior and sturdy body went home with me. Seven years later, my go-to pot, which looks pretty close to brand new thanks to meticulous upkeep, is still going strong. But with a smaller body and temperature limitations (I can’t cook anything past medium on the stove and 350 degrees Fahrenheit in the oven) it’s time for an upgrade. So, meet my new love, The Dutchess by Great Jones.

If you’re unfamiliar with Great Jones, it is a direct-to-customer cookware company that was founded in 2017 by Sierra Tishgart and Maddy Moelis, childhood best friends who set out on a mission to make quality cookware that’s not only aesthetically-pleasing, but offered at an affordable price point. With so many DTC cookware companies saturating the market at the moment, it can be hard for any brand to set themselves apart, but Great Jones has a not-so-secret weapon that blows everyone else out of the water: The Dutchess.

Designed to rival high-end brands like Le Creuset and Staub, The Dutchess is 6 3/4 quarts of enameled cast iron with a smooth coating on the inside and thrice-fired matte enamel finish on the outside. It’s currently available in 7 colors, and retails for $155.

What I love:

• Sturdiness: This thing has HEFT! At 15 pounds it’s not the lightest pot out there, but I feel confident that it’s sturdy enough to withstand any cooking project I throw at it.

• Size and shape: With its unique oval shape and nearly 7-quart volume, The Dutchess’ size is great for making big batches of stews as well as roasting large cuts of meat, and baking bread. The website even says that it’s big enough to roast an entire chicken!

• Price: While $155 is still a lot to spend on one kitchen item, it is massively more affordable than higher-end dutch ovens with the exact same capabilities.

• Color selection: My first introduction to The Dutchess was via Instagram when a large, pink dutch oven in a photo caught my eye. I wasn’t familiar with the logo, but based on the color I knew I had to learn more. Sadly, the pink color has been discontinued, but there are still several brilliant colors to choose from! When making my selection, I vacillated between the red (Marinara), and green (Broccoli) before ultimately deciding on yellow (Mustard). As soon as I opened the box I knew I’d made the right decision!

• Interior color: When making jams, sauces, or even browning butter, it’s important to be able to see what you’re doing to ensure you don’t end up with a burnt mess. Some brands, like Staub, sell dutch ovens with cast iron interiors. That’s perfectly fine for soups and bread, but not ideal for other tasks in which the food might blend in. Le Creuset sells dutch ovens with cream-colored enamel interiors that make it easy to see, but after extended use, the inside tends to discolor. The Dutchess offers the best of both worlds: a gray interior that’s light enough for proper color detection and dark enough to hide slight discoloration.

• High oven temperature tolerance: One major setback of my old Cuisinart is that I can’t cook anything in the oven past 350 degrees Fahrenheit. That means bread-baking is out, as well as finishing off dishes in the oven that require 375 degrees or higher. The Dutchess is oven-safe up to 500 degrees, and that is MARVELOUS.

• Stove-top agnosticism: Whether you have a gas range, electric stove, or induction cook top, The Dutchess can be safely used. This is especially helpful if you move house and find yourself working with a new burner system.

What I don’t love:

• Matte finish: One thing that bothered me right away was the matte finish on The Dutchess. All other dutch ovens I own or have looked at have a glossy finish that feels smooth to the touch. The matte finish on this oven feels slightly rough, and on more than one occasion, I’ve feared that any accidental slide on the gas range or bump from another pot on the stove is going to leave a huge scratch. So far, all marks have wiped off quickly and easily, but without the gloss, the outside has a bit of an “unfinished” look and feel.

• Weight: As mentioned above, this dutch oven is HEAVY. The weight makes it feel sturdy, but carrying this thing around can be a bit of a struggle, and cleaning with one hand almost impossible. If you’re making a soup, make sure to use your ladle for as long as you can because it’s difficult to hold this pot with one hand while trying to scrape out food with the other for longer than a few seconds.

I’ve had The Dutchess for just over a month and have thoroughly enjoyed my time with it so far. Even with the heat off for long periods of time, my food has stayed piping hot, and clean-up has been a DREAM. Like any cookware, how well you take care of it will determine how long you’ll have it, but I can tell that this is a quality piece that will be with me through many of my future kitchen ups and downs. And did I mention that I love the color? Yellow is the happiest hue on Earth, so even if you’ve burned that stew to the point of no return, at least the sunny color will put a smile on your face!

Learn more about The Dutchess by Great Jones HERE!

Birthday 2015

I've been a new age for exactly one week today. The slider is quickly reaching the middle of the twenty- something scale, and it is a fact that both scares me and excites me, depending on the day.

There are two types of people I've met in this world: people who absolutely looove birthdays, and people who threaten physical harm if there's even so much as a whisper of their birthday in the air. Me? I think I fall somewhere in the middle. I like birthdays, I think they're cool. I think it's important to celebrate each one because you never know how many you're going to get in this world. But I don't really go all out. Honestly, it's partially because they tend to sneak up on me now that I'm no longer in elementary school and there's no longer the obligation of a parent to throw a mini party with enough tiny forks and plates and cups, and copious amounts of brightly-colored frosted cupcakes for each member of my class. I also don't go all about because there's so much hype around birthdays that once it's over, I always feel a little bit of loss because I have to wait another whole year to again be the Birthday Princess.

I do exactly what I want, and when I want on my birthday; absolutely no exceptions. If I want to binge-watch an entire season of Friends in an afternoon, there is no judgement. If I want to sing at the top of my lungs to the hits off of The Emancipation of Mimi album in a house full of people, I'm going to do it. AND, if I want to bake my own birthday cake from start to finish and entirely from scratch, well, yeah I'm going to do it. And I did. I baked my own birthday cake. Three layers of very tender vanilla cake, slathered in a LOT of delicious buttercream frosting dyed a decidedly peach-ish tone depending on the angle, and topped with cute little sprinkles. It took me approximately four hours to make in total, and I loved every single second of it. For one, this cake is a GIANT step up from my last attempt to make a very small, very sad excuse for a cake. That very simple cake was hard work manifested. And it was delicious.

The older you get, the more time you spend reflecting. To that affect:

Five Very Important Things I've Learned in My Twenties So Far

1. Friends come and go, and friendship is a two-way street. Only make the effort for those who make the effort for you. That's what makes it special.
2. Quality over quantity in all aspects of life.
3. Listen to your elders when they're trying to tell you something. They've got stories that are better than anything you'll see in theaters, and, apart from the tiny embellishment here and there to keep your attention, they're totally true.
4. Work hard and have patience. You'll get everything you need and even some of the things you want, but it's probably going to take some time. And you know what? That’s okay.
5.  Having a plan is great, but don't forget to deviate sometimes and just enjoy the ride. Nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say.

As far as birthdays go, this one was pretty ace.

Here's to many more, eh?