Home cooks and chefs alike know the pleasure that comes from feeding someone their favorite foods. Throughout the pandemic, the majority of my kitchen projects have aimed to please my podmate husband.
Soft pretzels are among his favorite night snacks, but more often than not, we purchase frozen SuperPretzels and reheat them in the toaster oven. Yet making them from scratch isn’t that difficult.
In paging through Kelly Senyei’s forthcoming “The Secret Ingredient Cookbook” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30), I happened upon a recipe for soft pretzel knots that hails from Senyei’s mother.
“My mom, Noni, has mastered the art of pretzel bread, achieving the perfect balance of pillowy soft centers with chewy, glossy exteriors,” she writes.
The premise of the cookbook — and Senyei’s website, justataste.com — is to use a single ingredient that upgrades the dish from everyday OK to exemplary. In the case of these soft pretzel knots, the secret ingredient is everything bagel seasoning. However, if you don’t have a shaker on hand, coarse food-grade salt will still elicit the same kind of wow that my husband and his buddy uttered the night I served them these hot knots as they sat around the fire pit swilling beer.
Credit: Robert Bredvad
Credit: Robert Bredvad
Excerpted from “The Secret Ingredient Cookbook” © 2021 by Kelly Senyei. Photography © 2021 by Robert Bredvad. Reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
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