The American Farmer’s Table

Bread has always been something we have always been slightly obsessed with.  Our pursuit of learning how to make the perfect loaf eventually brought us to a small village outside of Rome to apprentice in a family bakery.  There, our bleary eyed 4 am mornings were spent watching an old man and his son work an enormous 200 year old brick oven to bake delicious crackly and chewy artisanal bread.  Our dreams of opening our own brick oven bakery eventually waned – maybe it had something to do with those 4 am mornings – but a love for baking bread was instilled in us and is something we now do regularly at home.

In all the years of baking bread, pretzels have never been something I considered making.  Looking through some of our baking books a few weeks ago I was struck with an intense urge to learn about pretzels and to try my hand at baking off a few batches.  I mixed doughs from three different recipes and the hands down winner was from Joe Otiz’s The Village Baker.  His simple yet interesting recipe has a slow yeast fermentation that adds a depth of flavor and the big, pillowy, soft pretzels were chewy and toothsome.  They actually rose much higher than expected and we thought to use them as rolls for a German inspired sandwich.  We slow braised red cabbage in white wine with sugar and caraway seeds until meltingly tender, broiled a few German sausages, and slathered some dijon on the split pretzels.  They were salty, and sweet and had a tinge of heat from the mustard and were perfect to wash down with a crisp German lager.