Pretzel Logic

As previously mentioned, my brother has a massive man-crush on Alton Brown. And I can understand why, honestly. Alton Brown is a great cook, an amusing television personality, expert in awesome kitchen gadgetry, and yet when he writes a recipe he actually seems to recognize that I do not have an army of dishwashers and assistants at my disposal. So when I decided I wanted to attempt homemade soft pretzels and saw that he had a recipe for them on the Food Network page, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to try out his food.

Now, the one thing about Alton Brown's work is that he does make certain assumptions about my kitchen. First let me state that these are not unreasonable assumptions that he makes: scales for measuring ingredients by weight are more and more common in household kitchens, and anybody who bakes more than once a year has freaking dough hooks, right?

Well...not That Seventies Mixer. No dough hooks here. That Seventies Mixer is old school, and if you want to make bread with it you will knead it by HAND, dammit, not like some kind of wussy little girl who needs a machine to make the bread for her. So that's what I did. "Fuck the commercialization of food that dictates the methods for my kneading!" I declared. "I will knead this bitch by hand, and I will be SMUG and SELF-SATISFIED about it!"

And that went fine. Pretzel dough didn't really take that long to get to the point of "smooth and pulls away easily from the bowl", and all was well. In retrospect, this was perhaps the moment in which I crossed over from "confident" to "over-confident." Or maybe it was back at the point where I started making declarations and referring to the dough as "this bitch". It can be hard to tell sometimes.

At any rate, I decided I was going to second-guess Mr. Brown again, this time on the parchment paper. No one around here bakes outside of me, remember? There's no parchment paper in this house, so if I wanted some I'd have to go all the way to the store. The STORE, people. That's, like...a whole mile from here. Fuck going to the store. Fuck it. We're just gonna fake it with wax paper. We've done it before with making chocolate chip cookies. It'll be fiiiiiiine.

You can see where this is going, right?

Everything was proceeding so nicely, too. I peeked in the oven, and those pretzels were works of freaking art. Perfect color, perfect size, just absolutely beautiful in practically every conceivable way. I opened the oven, and they smelled delicious. I'm thinking "Yes. YES. This is brilliant and amazing and my friends at the bar will be lucky if they get to even LOOK at these pretzels because I am going to eat them ALL." There was just a little teensy bit of smoke, so I didn't worry about that.

...until I tried to remove a pretzel that had been baked together with oiled wax paper. In some horrible twist of kitchen science, the paper had melded with the bottom of the pretzel in a terrifying culinary freak of nature like unto Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

"Goddammit," I muttered repeatedly, periodically interchanged with "Fuck" and "You have got to be fucking kidding me" as I attempted to extricate my beautiful pretzels from the evil clutches of wax paper.

Then I went to get my hair done, because I haven't had highlights in forever.

When I came back, I began to try peeling off paper again. It went a little better this time, and I decided to give eating a pretzel a try. And you know what?

Wax paper really doesn't taste all that bad. Or at least not all that noticeable. So when my uncle came in just now, I didn't tell him that the wax paper debacle had happened, just to see if he'd be all "wtf is wrong with these?" He declared them "great", so I now plan to totally sneak the original pretzels in with the new, non-waxy ones I'm working on making now. Here's hoping my friends don't notice the difference.

And Alton Brown? I'm sorry for questioning you. If you give my brother the opportunity to leave his wife for you, I promise to welcome you to the family with open arms and never alter your recipe instructions ever ever again.

Well, except for the fact that I'm just going to oil the pan and skip the paper entirely for this batch of pretzels. 'cause fuck going to the store.