Name: Homemade Soft Pretzels! Hilah Cooking
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T18:00:17.000Z
Duration: 10 min 26 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey dudes, I'm Hilah, and today on Hilah Cooking,

I made pimento cheese a couple days ago, and it got me thinking about soft pretzels, because what goes great with pimento cheese?

Soft pretzels are super great to make for a football game, or a sports game, or something like that, where you're gonna have people over to your house, drinking some beer, feed them some soft pretzels.

Alright, the dough for soft pretzels is actually super easy, especially if you have a stand mixer.

If not, you can do it by hand, and knead it by hand.

We're gonna start out with a yeasted dough, so I've got some hot water.

I like to start slightly hotter than it should be.

It should be between like 95 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit, so slightly warmer than body temperature.

I'm gonna add some brown sugar, and if your water's too hot, it'll kill the yeast, but I wanna get it a little bit warmer than normal, so I can dissolve this brown sugar.

So you should be able to stick your finger in it, and it feels warm, but it's not gonna burn you by any means.

So yeast is a living organism, and when it's sort of dormant, when you buy it in a little dry pouch like this, and then when you add it to the warm, sugary water, it wakes it up, and we're gonna pour it, just sprinkle it in over the top, and then we're gonna let it sit for five minutes, and that's the step that's called proofing the yeast.

Basically, you're proofing that it's still alive, and it's not dead.

So we're gonna let it sit for about five minutes.

When we come back, it should look nice, and like white and foamy, kind of like the head of a really nice beer, which reminds me, I should go get some beer while I'm waiting.

Okay, five minutes later, you can see this yeast is just like.

Looks a little bit like pond scum, but it's perfectly natural, and it's making bubbles.

And actually, so the yeast eats the sugar, if you didn't notice, the yeast eats the sugar, and produces carbon dioxide, and that's what makes the bubbles, and that's what makes bread rise.

So you can see it's already doing it now.

Okay, I'm gonna add a little bit of beer.

If you don't wanna use beer, you can use water, but I use about 1 1⁄2 cup of like a lager style beer, like a light.

Add some soft butter, couple tablespoons of butter, and some bread flour.

It's really important to use bread flour.

You can buy it most stores where they sell regular flour.

Bread flour has a higher gluten protein content, so it makes the breads like more elastic, and stringy, and stuff like that.

I'm like, look at me, I'm a gluten molecule.

Okay, so we're gonna add, and I apologize to y'all Europeans out there, but I took your great German pretzel recipe, and I made it not metric.

So I don't know how much this weighs, but I'm using about 3 1⁄4 cup of flour.

Start with a little bit less if you want, and then you can always add more.

That's better, usually with breads and things, it's better to have it be a little wet, and then add a little more flour than have it be too dry, and then have to work your way back.

And then we're just gonna knead this for about five minutes.

And as it goes, you know, you want it to sort of pull all together into a ball.

If it seems like it's gonna be too wet, you can add a little bit more flour, like a tablespoon at a time, or if it's too dry and it's not coming together, you can add a little bit of water, same way.

But give it a couple minutes to see if it comes together on its own first.

Okay, so this took about five and a half minutes.

I just kind of let it go until it formed the ball, like I said.

And now it feels kind of soft, and it should feel cool, but when you touch it, it's not sticky, it's not like sticking to my hands at all, it's not leaving any kind of residue.

And I'm gonna get a little bit more butter here,

I'm just gonna grease up this big, squishy ball, and put it back in this bowl.

You want it to be able to rise at slightly warmer than room temperature for about 30 minutes.

So we'll come back and show you how that's done, and then we'll actually make the pretzels.

30 minutes later, it has risen like a boner in the morn.

Okay, we're gonna divide this into eight little pieces.

If you want, you could do pretzel bites, or one big pretzel, or whatever.

I'm gonna make some regular-sized pretzels.

Throw those over there, and we're just gonna use one piece at a time.

And I find it's usually easier not to flour your surface.

A lot of times when you're rolling out dough, you wanna flour it, but because we're trying to stretch this out to a 24-inch snake, would be an awesome name for a porno, you kind of are stretching it a little bit, so the flour almost makes it too slick.

You want it to grip the counter a little bit.

And for a traditional German soft pretzel shape, you wanna leave the belly of the snake, the belly of the beast, a little bit fatter than the ends.

Take the two ends, flip them up, twist them together once, twice, and then down like that.

If you know anything about pretzels, you know that they get that, and bagels too, they get that shiny, golden brown crust from a little quick dip in some lye water.

Lye is very caustic, it's very alkaline, it can be a little bit dangerous if you don't know what you're doing, and it's actually really hard to find at a grocery store.

So this is baking soda, and baking soda is also alkaline, but not so much as lye, but if you put it on a little foil-lined tray like this, and put it in your oven at 250 degrees for about an hour, it makes it more alkaline and closer to the pH of lye.

I'm gonna whisk this into some warm water, just to dissolve it.

If you stick your fingers in it, it feels kind of slippery and soapy, and that's how people used to make soap, was mixing lye with oil or something, like beef tallow, prairie soap.

Okay, so I'm gonna dip my pretzels into this little lye solution, one at a time.

Kind of let them soak for about 10 seconds on each side.

And then while it's still wet from your fake lye bath, sprinkle it with a little coarse salt.

They actually make what's called pretzel salt that you can buy at gourmet stores, like spice stores, but I don't have that.

Okay, we're gonna keep doing this with all the pretzels.

Okay, so now I'm gonna start my oven preheating to 475 while I let these rest for another 30 minutes just uncovered.

It's gonna let the skin kind of dry out a little bit and it's gonna give them a nice little crispy crust.

Definitely, definitely fill in that on my little bitten down bloody cuticles.

Okay, see you in 30 minutes, not literally.

Okay, another little rise and our yeast has done its job.

Thanks for your work, but you're dying now.

We're gonna put them in 475 for eight to 12 minutes.