Henry is good for more than just pizza and bread, so I’ve been playing around with other sourdough recipes. Some of them call for dry yeast in addition to a sourdough starter, but I skipped that this time to see what Henry could do. I also skipped a few of the other ingredients, and just added beer…I don’t need a reason!
- 321 g sourdough starter
- 301 g bread flour
- 70 g Bell’s Porter (woot Michigan beer!)
- 1 T melted butter
- 1 t kosher salt
- 1 egg (for an egg wash)
- Baking soda, sugar, and water (to boil pretzels to get nice brown color)
- Salt for salting (like pretzel salt…you know what I mean)
The technique is something I mashed together from reading the King Arthur recipe and what I remembered from the Good Eats pretzel episode (I may have cheated).
I mixed the dough ingredients (first 5 on the list) until they came together as a nice dough and let it rest for 45 minutes. Then, I divided it up, rolled out long ropes, and shaped the pretzels.
These pretzels got dipped into the boiling water with baking soda and sugar (the ratio from Good Eats is 2/3 cup baking soda to 10 cups water, but I didn’t write down what I actually did…sorry). This step was a bit of a mess since the dough started to melt/dissolve in the water, but they survived to get an egg wash and then baked till golden brown and delicious. Notice how I didn’t say beautifully golden brown and delicious…they were not good looking.
I think I need to work on both my dough handling and my yeast. These did not rise much. Either I need to add dry yeast or be better about how to properly use Henry. Maybe a stronger dough would hold on to the carbon dioxide better, I really don’t know. These were pretty flat, but I still was able to dip some in mustard and split others to make soft pretzel sandwiches.
