First Steps for Cutting & Shaping Pretzel Dough

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Rachel for Expert Village. Now I'm going to show you how to shape the pretzels. I just wanted to mention after finishing kneading the dough, we preheat the oven for temperature of 425. 425 it has been cooked in a high temperature. You can either now rip it with your hands into small balls. I prefer to take a knife and cut it, it makes it easier. If you make snake and just cut through the pieces out, later on it would make it easier for you to shape the pretzels. There is an option to make bigger pretzels or little ones. It depends what your family likes. We prefer them a little bit bigger so I'm going to have around 2 dozens pretzels. But if you want to make little ones, then you can get up to 4 dozens pretzels. Now we are going to make a long snake and we just shape it into a pretzel shape. This dough does not even if it has yeast inside it does not need to rise. We are going to bake it right away not letting it sit and rise. You can see I'm making a pretzel shape and I'm just pressing both ends so it would not open during baking. After we finish shaping them we are going to put them in the tray. We don't need to leave big space between each other cause they don't really rise too much. You don't want to put them too close cause you don't want them to stick together but you don't need a big space. There is different toppings that you can put on them once you have them in the pan. If you like them sweet instead of the coarse, salt brush it with egg and put sugar on top. You can put sesame seed on top, you can leave it plain only brush it with the egg and put nothing on top."