Homemade pretzels have been something I’ve wanted to try for a long time. I’ve also always loved pigs-in-a-blanket. Pretzel Pigs-in-a-Blanket put them both together. Making the pretzel dough myself was a little more effort than opening a can of crescent rolls, but the results were worth it. The pretzel flavor comes from a quick boil in baking soda water. After that, I just sprinkled them with coarse salt and baked them for about 15 minutes.
The pretzel dough is essentially the same recipe as ciabatta bread or pizza dough. It’s a little drier so you can knead it by hand, since the ball of dough will be too small to knead in your stand mixer. Place a piece of parchment paper on your counter to knead, and you can use it later to bake the pretzel rolls. I let my dough rise about 3 hours before I started wrapping the sausages because that’s what worked for me. Less rise would have been fine too, since you’ll be flattening the dough to wrap the sausages anyway.
If you double the recipe, you can wrap two packages of sausages. And 3 cups of flour are about the minimum amount to knead in a stand mixer. Use a dough hook to mix the pretzel dough ingredients in your stand mixer on low speed, and continue mixing after the dough comes together for about 5 minutes of kneading. Sounds great, right? But the five minutes you save in kneading will be eaten up in wrapping those extra sausages and quickly boiling them in baking soda water. And if the dough might get stuck on the dough hook and not really knead. If it does, you can just pull it off and finish kneading by hand. It’s not a big deal and shouldn’t scare you away from these pretzel and sausage bites.
Even with packaged crescent rolls, these little treats are a bit time consuming. What’s an extra 15 minutes really? It’s the time it takes to take pigs-in-a-blanket to the next level. Soft pretzels – yum.
Pretzel Pigs-in-a-Blanket
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups bread flour
- ¾ teaspoon salt
- ¾ teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon instant yeast
- 2 teaspoons olive oil
- 2/3 cup water
- 1 package cocktail sausages about 30
- 12 cups water
- 2 tablespoons baking soda
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- Coarse salt
Instructions
- Mix first 6 ingredients (flour, salt, yeast, sugar, oil and 2/3 cup water) in a large bowl until a dough forms. Place a piece of parchment paper on your counter and sprinkle it with flour. Knead the dough for about 5 minutes.
- Coat the inside of the mixing bowl with olive oil. Return the dough to the bowl and let rise at least 1 hour. You can let it rise longer for better flavor.
- When ready to cook, divide the dough into 4 pieces, then divide each of those pieces in half giving you 8 pieces. Divide each of the 8 pieces into 4 small pieces, giving you a total of 32 small dough balls.
- Fill a large stainless steel stockpot half way (or measure out 12 cups of water). Add the baking soda and sugar and bring the water to a boil, stirring from time to time.
- Start preheating the oven to 450 degrees. Place a baking dish filled with water into the oven to create steam which will help the pretzels brown.
- Open the cocktail sausages and dry them off on a paper towel.
- Flatten the first piece of dough into a small rectangle. Wrap the dough around a cocktail sausage. Continue until all the sausages have been wrapped. You may be left with a few extra dough pieces.
- At this point, you can let the dough rise again for about 10-20 minutes. Or start boiling them immediately beginning with the ones you wrapped first.
- Working in small batches of 4-6 sausages, gently place the wrapped sausages into the boiling water. Allow them to boil for 15-20 seconds, then remove with a slotted spoon and allow them to drain on a paper towel. Boil the extra dough pieces the same way. The dough should puff up slightly during boiling.
- When all sausages have been boiled and drained, place them on a parchment lined baking sheet. Don’t skip the parchment since the baking soda solution will be corrosive to an aluminum baking sheet. You may have to rewrap the dough around the sausages since the seam tends to come apart in the boiling water.
- Sprinkle with coarse salt.
- Bake for about 15 minutes or until deep golden brown.
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