Since I couldn’t do biscuits again until I got to the store to get more baking powder, I went ahead and did the pretzels one more time, trying a third recipe. One of the Good Eats episodes on my TiVo was Pretzels!

These ended up more or less a combination of everything, and I think as perfect as I can get them. I learned the reason they’re not “perfect” is that I’m unwilling to do a lye soak (I’m just not that extreme). That’s a big relief! I thought I was doing things wrong within the methods I was using.

I also learned there is a very fine line in the baking soda bath between not-enough-time-to-brown and gooey-in-a-bad-way. One recipe said over a minute on each side, another said 30 seconds altogether! I found that for me, using a frying pan large enough to hold five cups of water (with 1/3 cup of baking soda), which is my largest at the moment, 23 seconds on each side was pretty much the line. 15 seconds wasn’t nearly long enough, and 26 was when it started absorbing water. If you’re very observant you can see it start to puff—just take a couple seconds off of that for the next.

Some might prefer an egg wash for shine, but I still prefer the butter as a salt-attachment device. I also prefer just using kosher salt to buying pretzel salt, since I prefer less salt in general.

The half-and-half wheat and white, while reducing some of the flour seems a good combo. The recipe I ended up with called for 4.5 cups of AP flour, and I did 2 cups each of AP and WW.

I really ended up with several great recipes out of this—both the straight-to-baking edition and the boiled-in-baking-soda version, and the straight white and the more nuanced whole wheat mixture variations. Any are better than the frozen supermarket and fast food versions, though probably inferior to a good pretzel stand pretzel (I’ve never had one of those). Not to mention additional applications such as pretzel hot dogs for the husband or cheese filled pretzels for me.