Pretzel rolls!

So this morning I decided to make rolls. Specifically, pretzel rolls. I found this recipe online and I love trying new things in the kitchen so last week I went searching for all the ingredients (bread flour was surprisingly difficult to find in my neck of the woods). We have an abundance of leftover turkey and I'm making turkey soup tonight so I thought today would be a good day to try them. See the thing is, I've never made rolls from scratch before.

When I lived in Kalamazoo, in my first apartment, we'd bake bread and rolls but after buying that frozen bread dough at the grocery store. Good stuff, but not quite homemade. And my mom doesn't make rolls. She makes just about everything else but rolls are not her thing. She tries, God bless her, but she's never happy with the result (though Dad, Angela and I are always content to eat them).

I was a little nervous this morning because it seems like a thing you can screw up, making rolls. So much can happen. The yeast might not rise, you might add just not enough or too much of something. I'm a better cook than a baker. Cooking is not an exact science, baking is much more so.

I also realized early on we might not have the right equipment but my mom said that Angela's mixer with the handy dandy dough hook we've never used would take the place of the called for food processor. And it did, splendidly.

I was also a little skeptical that the recipe called for me to punch and knead the dough for five whole minutes. A) Five minutes is a long time. B) When my mom bakes, usually the less you touch the dough, the better - cookies and plunkett get tough when you need the dough too much.

While the recipe was a bit more complicated than what I'm used to (it's from Bon Appetit magazine), it wasn't really hard and it was kind cool seeing the ingredients transform.

And I even referred to the boiling of the rolls as my science experiment - until the science experiment went awry. The recipe called for me to add 1 and 1/4 cups of baking soda to a pot of boiling water. It did not mention to do this slowly or not all at once. So I plopped the soda in and BOOM! Big frothy explosion of water everywhere. I had three burners going (cooking down the turkey carcass for soup on two) and the oven and of course, there went the pilot lights. So once we cleaned up that mess...

We were back on track. I had enlisted Angela in helping and I was glad to have the extra set of hands.

 And here are the rolls as they went in to the oven.

And when they came out!

Beautiful (though I did say I'll have to work on the sizing a bit).

And tasty! The outside was crunchy like a soft pretzel, the inside tasted faintly of celery seed and overall, a big success. This recipe's definitely a keeper and I can't wait to make them for Mom and Dad in Michigan!