for about a week now, thinking Guy Fieri's stuffed pretzels would make my husband's life complete. It's no secret: I married a carbaholic. So as he flipped between Sunday afternoon football and NCAA basketball games, I put on my apron and got to work.
The husband is always picking on me because I can never seem to make a recipe without leaving an ingredient out - or adding one of my own genius ideas to it. I was determined to follow this recipe exactly, from start to finish. And I almost succeeded. Really, I tried. But we didn't have any agave, so I decided to swap that out for some local honey. Besides that, though, I did everything Guy told me.
I got the kitchen prepped and ready to go.
Everything seemed to be going along smoothly. The water reached a nice 110 degrees straight from the faucet, and after five minutes, my yeast was ready.
Unfortunately, I began to worry when it came time to mix the dough in the food processor. (Go me, though, for using my dough attachment for the first time today!) Was I supposed to use a ginormous processor? The flours didn't mix together as easily as I'd hoped.
I cut the dough into four sections, just as Guy instructed.
No matter what I did, though, I couldn't get my dough to reach an 11x14 rectangle.
I made a batch without stuffing first. But I thought I'd be a bit adventurous with the second batch of dough and added some grated cheese, mixed up pepper and mixed up salt.
My pretzels ended up being babies. They were so small!
The process got a bit easier as I went, although none of my pretzels looked anything like the ones in the magazine, and I realized baking them for 16-18 minutes was WAY too long. A good 10 minutes in my oven, and they were perfect. I think the husband will be set for at least the next couple of weeks of basketball season.
I've got this tagged in my magazine as well but haven't given them a try yet. The recipe does say that it makes 28 small pretzels so I think yours turned out perfect-sized. But they do make them look huge in the pictures, don't they. I think yours look fantastic.
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