I know that they’re not traditionally thought of as a pizza shop item, but I’ve been playing around with making them the last week or so, and I think they have a few things to recommend them. The dough is remarkably similar to pizza dough, differing mostly in using butter instead of olive oil and having a lower hydration level, but the flour and everything else are fairly identical. They’re easy to shape, store well, bake up fast and can be topped in a variety of ways to complement other menu items, like sprinkling them with garlic and Parmesan and serving them with marinara. They cost only pennies to make, and the shape is flat enough to go through a conveyor oven.
I had thought that they might make an excellent kid’s menu item, or a more elaborately topped version could serve as a full blown side. Also with the food cost being so low on them, they could be used as a free item to give to children if you are running a dinning room, a small price to pay for the kid dragging the family back because they want another pretzel.
I was sneering at your idea for a couple sentences…then you made a great point and I’m now wondering how much of my dough that I’ve been throwing away could have been sold in another form. A gourmet pretzel maybe? We already have one unique menu item that is a huge money maker, I wonder what else is out there.
A fast food sandwich chain in my town makes pizza pretzels with a marinara and cheese, they also make a ranch pretzel with ranch, cheese, and diced bacon, and a chili pretzel with cheese. Very popular with the teens.
Pretzels are made from essentially the same dough as pizza, bagels, French bread, and Vienna bread. They’re all in a class of breads that we call “Old World” breads. They’ve been around for a long time. So, that being said, what makes a pretzel different? To get their unique flavor and to some extent appearance, they are dipped in an alkali bath just before going to the oven. This is typically about a 2% sodium hydroxide solution that is heated to about 200F (this can be dangerous stuff to work with, so you had bettter know what you are doing, and how to do it). Another type of soft pretzel can also be made using a baking soda dip. In this case you make a dip solution of 5% baking soda in hot water. This gives the finished pretzel a different flavor. Yet another type of soft pretzel can be made using a dip solution of 10to 15% honey or non-diastatic malt syrup. This gives an entirely different finished pretzel flavor. Some pretzels are dipped in a melted butter bath immediately after baking to impart a buttery flavor. If you are going to add some Italian seasonings, like we would add to our breadsticks, they should be added soon after they are dipped in the butter bath. Done right, you might have a winner, done wrong, you have only made a pretzel shaped breadstick.
Pretzels bake well in an air impingement oven, but due to the dip, they exhibit a nasty habit of welding themselves to the conveyor. To address this, we bake the pretzels on silicone paper baking sheets available from any bakery ingredient supplier.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
I’m doing mine at home with the baking soda dip and an egg wash for glossy color, they really are gorgeous coming out of the oven. I’m baking on greased parchment as well, they do have a tendency to stick otherwise. I found that air drying them on a rack for a few minutes before baking works wonders on the sticking problem though, if they go on the sheet directly from the baking soda dip they really get glued to it.
I have a school that ordered prettles for their hot lunch last year from another smoothie pretzel shop from down the road and when the school phoned them the week before with the amount they wanted the store didnt realize how many it would be and said they couldnt do that many (380) The lady from the school phoned me and asked if we did pretzels and I told he no we didnt she then went on to explain he problem and how the kids were expecting pretzels so I told her to give me an hour and I would see what I could do. I knew I didnt have time to experiment and get my dough perfected for pretzels so I phoned my supplier and asked if they had pre baked frozen jumbo pretzels which I figured they would. Sure enough they did so I ordered them in and phoned her back and said actually I do pretzels now! we defrosted them the night before the order and spred pizza sauce on them and baked them in the oven and they were fantastic so now they order them from me every few months. I havent added them to the menu but am think of doing so in the future.