“Huete ist Brezeltag”
And that’s 90% of what I remember from three years of German in high school. It translates to: “today is pretzel day” and reminds me that #1) you can never predict completely what you’ll remember and #2) your first experience trying something isn’t indicative of your long term success.
So, since I doubt anyone reading this is too terribly interested in my (failed) attempts to learn German, let’s instead turn to my (somewhat) failed attempt to make pretzels.
TA-DA!
Now, if all you can muster is a look of quiet confusion, I understand. After all, aren’t pretzels supposed to look something like this?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Not necessarily.
Now while my ‘pretzels’ most certainly do not look the part, they do on the other hand hold up quite well on the taste test. You can see on the baked good to the far right on my plate above, with a texture similar to what you would find in a ‘correct’ pretzel.
But, we do walk away from this pretzel baking experience at least a little bit wiser. I made a few substitutions to the recipe to make it dairy free, swapping out cow’s milk for almond milk and regular butter for a vegetable-oil based version. Now I’m far from an experienced baker on the best of days, so choosing to substitute two important ingredients may have been contributors to my rookie mistakes. I also have a sense that the dough was too wet when we started to form the pretzels.
Next time, because there WILL be a next time, I plan to try the following changes:
Using an oven that we actually know the temperature of
Waiting a little longer for the dough to rise
Creating longer and thinner strings (?) of dough to form the pretzel shapes with
We will post a comparison photo after those are made so that we can compare. As I’ll be baking other things in the meantime, hopefully I’ll learn something and actually get better before I try again though. (If anyone has any beginner baking blogs they love, please leave them in the comments).
And here’s a photo of my very cute and exceedingly patient husband helping with the preparation. Baking pro tip? If you’re a little on the impatient side (there’s literally nothing that you can do to make things rise faster, by the way), keep someone calm close by and your perfectionist tendencies that make you rush, might just chill for a bit.
Now, you’re probably wondering why I wrote this post and included photos of what many would consider to be a failed attempt at baking. Here are the reasons:
To have a record.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever gotten good at something, but the process has taken so long and been so insidious, that you hardly even remember how it happened?
I think, if I don’t make a proper effort to record it, baking could qualify for this. I remember looking back on things that I improved on over time and wishing that I had something to show my progress along the way.
To help myself stay motivated
A bit related to point #1, sometimes when you feel like you’re not going anywhere, it can be helpful to look back and to see how far you’ve come. Having a record of your starting point and the troubles that you’ve overcome to reach the point that you’re at today, can be extremely motivating when you’re taking on a new or difficult task.
Imagine in a year from now - I could be trying to bake something so complex that I’ve never even heard of it today. And then I’ll be able to look back on my “pretzels”, have a laugh, and realize that I am capable of achieving anything if I just try without fear of failure (and leave enough time to try again).
To practice and learn
When I was in university, I figured out that the best way for me to learn something is to write it. I used to spend hours just rewriting my notes across notebooks and computers and the difference between this versus just repeating it in my mind or even reading it, was substantial.
By recording my not-so-successful efforts, I’m thinking a bit deeper into what I could have done differently and what I will do differently in my next pretzel making extravaganza.
To give myself something to laugh about
If we can’t laugh at ourselves, what can we laugh about? I remember as I was making these, looking at them on the dough and thinking “ah yes, there’s actually no way that these will work”. Chara looked at them, he looked at me, and we both couldn’t help but laugh.
Previous to that, I had been getting a little internally stressed out about the progress (or lack thereof) of the pretzels. I had lost sight of the fact that it was supposed to be fun. I’m not a professional baker (yet! Ha ha), we made a bunch of changes to the recipe, and we have plenty of other things to eat if these don’t turn out. What’s the stress gonna do? (spoiler alert: nothing).
The point I’m trying to make here is that no-one starts out perfect at anything - especially not something like baking where so much of the process is in the hands of chemistry and your oven. So, enjoy the mistakes. Don’t eat the ones that look undercooked. And relax.
Really.
I felt myself starting to tighten when the dough didn’t rise perfectly. But I let it go and in the end we had tasty, if a bit ugly, “pretzels”.
And you know what? I’m looking forward to the next time I try and bake. :)
Which in my mind, is the biggest measure of success.