Soft Pretzels Recipe (2024)

I suggest using the extra prepared baking soda (now sodium carbonate) to boil regular spaghetti with to make alkaline (yellow-ish, chewy) noodles for dishes like “hot and dry Wuhan noodles” when the craving hits you but you can’t get any from a store. I always keep a jar of this stuff around. Just a warning that the water will froth enormously when you boil the spaghetti, so use a big pot only half filled with water.

Have been making a similar recipe for years....baking soda will still make a better pretzel than almost anything out on the streets of NYC today. Lye not needed.

I think you’re forgetting that most of that baking soda will be left behind in the leftover water bath.

Please remember that in small NYC apartments many of us do not have stand mixers. Please always tell how long to beat the dough by hand or with a hand mixer.

3725mg sodium per serving? Um, no thanks. Look delicious and beautifully photographed, I must say.

I make pretzels for a living and I use baking soda because lye is completely toxic however you don’t need brown sugar in my opinion you don’t need the brown sugar and you don’t need to bake the baking soda just dissolve in the water and bring to a boil then boil them for 30 seconds on each side.Beautiful pretzels every time .

We made these according to the recipe and they turned our great! I also made a cheese sauce to accompany them, and then made fruit smoothies (with lots of spinach) and called it Fun Sunday Dinner.

It’s misleading to say kosher salt “such as Diamond Crystal”, since not all kosher salt is the same. Salt brands should not be suggestions. I learned this the hard way and ruined fried chicken.From the excellent Food52 explainer:“Diamond Crystal is less salty and more crumbly, whereas Morton is much saltier and denser. You cannot, I repeat, cannot swap out one for the other without adjusting the amounts. Doing so will either create a much saltier recipe or a significantly undersalted dish.”

We followed this recipe except we did not bake the baking soda. We read in one of the comments to boil for 30 seconds, so we did that. Unfortunately, we had to toss our batch — way too much soda bicarbonate and it tasted terrible and bitter. Where did we go wrong? Not baking the soda? Boiling for too long?

Way too much sodium carbonate. Inedible.

This recipe does require more work than others I have tried. But the results are worth it. Amazing color and texture with really nice flavor.

Have made these twice with very good results. I’ve learned to pull back a bit on the baking soda in the water because it can leave quite a bitter taste behind.

Baking the baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, turns it into sodium carbonate. Sodium carbonate produces a more alkaline solution when added to water than sodium bicarbonate.

This recipe makes me nervous with the casual inclusion of sodium carbonate (the baked baking soda) with no further safety notes. One is no longer dealing with baking soda at this point: it has become dangerously alkaline, and it should not be touched or especially inhaled in its undiluted powder form.I have found recipes that use a baking soda solution to produce excellent results— and to be more friendly! I form the pretzels and dunk in a room-temp soda bath, and bake. No need to wait 45 min.

I am a new pretzel maker. Did some research on lye v no lye. Baking soda baked or not baked. Etc. This is the 2nd recipe I tried and decided to substitute barley malt for the brown sugar in the water bath (4.5 tbsps). I otherwise followed the recipe and these came out GREAT. (I do recommend checking the oven on the early side; may have just been my oven but they were just slightly too well done after 14 minutes.) Will definitely use for a large party I have planned next month.

These turned out great! BUT I destroyed my favorite Calphalon pan b/c I forgot to wash the baking soda wash out immediately and it ate through the anodized coating. Yikes. Also, since I didn't have a slotted spatula I used a slotted spoon plus tongs to flip & remove the pretzels, so they got about 20 seconds per side and were therefore more bitter than I'd like. But they're still pretty great. Calphalon replaced the pan ;-).

You can make crispy pretzels if you know how.

I don’t understand how you put a proofed (soft) pretzel into a warm water bath and not have it fall apart. After I proved the pretzels I refrigerated them so that I could manage them in the water.Does the water bath need to be warm? Could you spritz the pretzels with the baking soda solution?

In the middle of this recipe. I decided to add some malt. If it works out, I’ll enter a better note.

I made this with assistance from 3 toddlers. I made the dough the night before. Lots of little steps they shared like rolling the dough strips, shaping the pretzels, adding the egg wash and salt. And the pretzels were wonderful! A big hit in my book!

These turned out perfect for me! Just used all purpose flour and I didn’t have a silicone mat so I used parchment paper. They were a little tricky getting off the paper before the baking soda bath, but manageable. Definitely making again!

Does anyone know what stage is best (dough, post bath, fully baked, etc) to freeze these? I don’t need 10 pretzels at once.

A good recipe that I had fun with and made delicious pretzels. Two minor problems with the recipe as written: 1. The video says bake the baking soda for 10 minutes, while the recipe says bake for 1 hour. That's a major error. I went with 1 hour, but can't say if that was the right way to go. 2. The recipes says 3/4 cup or 136 grams of baking soda. 136 grams was 1/2 a cup, not 3/4 of a cup, and the recipe says it will shrink during baking, and you need 1/2 a cup, so I went with 3/4.