Since I’ve been on my no dairy diet, I have realised that there aren’t many nice breads that I can buy in the store. In particular, I realised that Gardenia bread has milk powder in it. This was a pretty gut wrenching realisation, as I really love the many different types of Gardenia bread. Butterscotch, chocolate chip, raisin, wholemeal… Delicious! The up side of this realisation however, has been that I can bake my own bread.

Back in Sydney, I had tried multiple times to bake bread. I tried so many recipes, and they all failed. I don’t know whether I had a bad batch of yeast, but none of the breads rose properly. This time around, at the start of January I returned to my old faithful, the person whose recipes I have so far never failed at using… Jamie Oliver. In particular, his basic bread recipe. And to my surprise, I ended up with a nice round loaf of bread!

Emboldened by my success, today I tried baking pretzels, using the soft pretzels recipe indexed at the MSPI Mama website.

As a very non intuitive cook, who, despite being a massive Auntie Annes fan, I need step by step instructions. I gathered my ingredients, I mixed, and I kneaded. And then I went to roll my pretzels. “But… but…”, my brain stammered. “The recipe doesn’t tell me how long my pretzel dough should be, or how to actually roll the pretzel shape!”

I laughed at myself, and then found myself reminiscing on the time I made supersoft ensaymadas. I followed the recipe precisely there also, but again, didn’t know how big my ensaymadas should be as I rolled them and prepared them for baking. They ended up ginormous. And today in the case of my pretzels, they look like bread versions of those little plastic dog poops that you get in novelty stores. Also huge. Next time I know: The pretzel dough needs to be very thiiiiiiin and very looooong, and I don’t have to worry about them looking a little skinny pre bake. After baking, they will puff up to be about 3 times the size they went into the oven at!

The picture was taken with my iPod camera in bad light, which is why it’s so grainy. On reflection, I clearly still need to work out how to roll a pretzel!! The pretzel looks quite white on the bottom here, because I didn’t have any baking paper. I used flour dusted aluminium foil instead, so the bottom of the pretzel is very flour-y.

Overall, the recipe is quite good. I would add a touch more salt to the dry mix next time, and I also need to remember to be extremely liberal with the egg wash. I only put a little on (the same amount as I would if I was baking a loaf of bread) but I now know I should have put a lot more on. I also screwed up the oven settings and had the heat on only at the bottom of the oven, which is another reason why it looks so pale.

And next time I’m going to buy some powdered cinnamon. Boo yeah.