Caramel pretzel tutorial

Finally! I've promised a few people a tutorial of the famous caramel pretzels we give out at Christmas, so here it is!

 The cast...

I like using the shorter pretzel rods, yes, they are less dramatic looking, but they are far less likely to break, and when you're working with sticky caramel, that's a bonus. I got my pretzel rods at Sams Club. I like to use 3 different kinds of chocolate, white, dark and milk. Do you have an Aldi where you live? Check and see... I buy my European dark chocolate there, and it's pretty cheap, plus it's delicious! I always use Peter's Caramel, you can get it a cake/baking supply stores, but since I don't have one nearby, I ordered mine from Amazon. I think it's a bit more expensive, but it came right to my door, so it was the lesser of two evils for me. I buy the 5 pound block, trust me, you'll use it. 

You'll want to make sure you have plenty of cookie sheets (I have 4 and they were all used), waxed paper, microwave safe bowl for melting the caramel, and a skillet with sides for melting the chocolate, you could also use a microwave safe bowl for that too.

OK let's get started....

First cut a softball sized chunk of caramel off the big brick... melt in a microwave safe bowl for 1 minute on high, then at 30 second intervals until melted. It took me 1 and a half minutes. Don't get it too warm, you want it thick, but manageable. Here is an illustration of how Tadd does the caramel. It turns out looking so nice, we get so many questions about how we make the caramel all twisty like... Tadd really is the caramel master, he does every single one!

Here is an important note... don't line your pan with waxed paper yet! The caramel will stick to the waxed paper and you will scream and curse because all your hard work was in vain. I'm serious. Just prop the little beauties up on the side of the cookie sheet like so. This is why you don't want the caramel too hot, or it will drip down and make them all funky and misshapen.

Now, if you want some to have nuts, before you prop them up to dry, take the caramel pretzels right from the hands of the twister, and roll it in chopped, toasted nuts (I like almonds, peanuts and pecans) you'll end up grabbing a handful of nuts and squeezing them around the pretzel stick before too long, it's easier that way, and the nuts stick better.

Now these babies have cooled long enough to make the caramel hard-ish. Plus I run the pan out to my garage when it's done. Did I mention it was -33 here yesterday? Yes, you read that right, it was negative 33 degrees.  That means my garage was a balmy 11 degrees, and those pretzel sticks firmed up real fast.  

While the pretzel sticks are firming up, you'll want to melt the chocolate. I have a cuisinart  electric frying pan that works perfectly for this. You'll want to break your chocolate up into pieces and put in the frying pan, and turn it on the WARM function. Put on the lid and let it sit for a few minutes, grab a spatula and give it a stir, you'll be surprised how quickly it melts. Now my Grammy taught me that the trick to avoiding "blooms" or white powdery looking chocolate is to keep it moving while you're dipping, or in our case, drizzling, since it wasn't deep enough to dip. Once the chocolate is melted, turn the pan OFF, if the chocolate starts to get too firm, just turn it back to the warm function for 5 seconds, then turn it back off, this will be enough heat to re-melt it. Don't forget to keep stirring while you dip. You don't want too thick of a chocolate layer, or it will tend to pool, once I get a layer of chocolate on my pretzel stick, I turn it upside down and really give it a good shake, get all that extra chocolate off, or it will pool. You can go ahead and prop your pretzel sticks up again, or you can lay them flat, we did both and I prefer propping them up.

When the chocolate isn't set yet, don't forget to use sprinkles if you want. I found these cute snowflake sprinkles at Crate & Barrel.

Now it's time to dip some white chocolate pretzels. I actually did buy white chocolate this year instead of just the "dipping dots" or whatever they sell at michaels,  and to tell you the truth? I don't prefer one over another, so if you're like me, you can save yourself some money and buy the Michaels stuff! Anyway, the white chocolate is the easiest, my best advice is to not make it too warm, you want it barely thick enough to pour. It helps to have a cold cookie tray too.

I used sparkling sugar because I ran out of the edible glitter, which I like much better, but the sparkling sugar worked just fine.


I found this at walmart for cheap, cheap cheap...

Mmmm....

After these were firmed up, I stacked them up in preparation for bagging.

I drizzled a bunch of them, don't look too close, I did a horrible job!

The finished product, all bagged and ready for Tadd to give his coworkers. The big container of pretzels made enough for 35 bags, 6 in each bag. This was not counting all the ones Harrison snagged. Kudos to all the people that have cooking blogs, this post took me a loooong time to do!! I'm not sure when I'll do another tutorial! Merry Christmas everyone!