Soft Pretzels Recipe

A soft pretzel is defined by one step that no other bread in this library uses: before baking, the shaped dough takes a quick dip in an alkaline bath. That bath is what gives a pretzel its mahogany sheen, its distinctive savory tang, and the chewy, almost lacquered skin under the coarse salt. Without it you just have a shaped roll; with it you have a pretzel.

The dough is an enriched lean dough — flour, 68% water, 2% salt, 1.5% yeast, 2% sugar, and 10% butter. The butter and a little sugar keep the crumb soft and tender, which is what makes these the American mall-style soft pretzel (think Auntie Anne's) rather than a hard, snappy one. The numbers are tuned for that pillowy pull-apart chew; for a Bavarian-style pretzel you would lean the dough out toward roughly 56% hydration and about 5% butter for a denser, more traditional bite.

The alkaline bath is the technique to understand. A baking-soda solution is the safe home version — and works better if you bake the baking soda first, which converts it to a stronger alkali. The traditional bakery method uses food-grade lye, which gives a deeper color and more authentic flavor but demands gloves, eye protection, and respect. Either way the dip is brief, seconds per pretzel, and the alkalinity is what lets the surface brown so fast and so dark in the oven through accelerated browning reactions.

Beyond the bath it is straightforward: mix, proof, roll into ropes, shape the classic twist, dip, salt, and bake hot. Best eaten warm the day they are made, ideally with mustard.