Being new to the baking world, I've been trying out different breads that caught me interest. The first one was made about two weeks ago with help from my girlfriend. Being a Philadelphia boy living in Atlanta, I've been missing pretzels. Watching Good Eats the other day was a new episode dedicated to pretzels so I figured why not.
Here's a picture after the baking soda soak. Watching this pretzel episode, Alton Brown shows how to use bowling baking soda instead of the lye bath to get nice color on them so this is the route I took.
This one I'm quite proud of. My girlfriend and I couldn't find pretzel salt anywhere and we didn't want to order it online because we wanted to cook that night. Our best idea, go to the mall and sweet talk the Auntie Anne's Pretzel girl for some. What we got was almost a full pound of the white stuff.
Lastly, a few shots of the final product. I didn't rotate them properly so the ones on the top rack got darker than the bottom, but they were all good.
The second bread was made last night and was my attempt at italian bread. It came out quite good but I'm still having a problem w/ a lot of my breads where the top is rock hard. I'm going to have to ask in the forums when I get a chance. Otherwise, this was quite tasty, especially for a midnight PB & J :)
