Here's the outcome:
Start off with a packet of yeast, some brown sugar, and a little bit of salt.
Mix it together with some warm water.
Now add a few cups of all purpose unbleached flour and some bread flour.
Then knead it together for about 8 minutes until you get a nice smooth consistency.
Take out the vegetable oil and coat a bowl with it. Put the dough in there and make sure it's coated in the oil before putting a lid on it.
This takes about 2 hours to rise. In the meantime, I mixed some warm water and baking soda. Before we put the pretzels in the oven, we'll dip it in this mixture which will help it rise a little more.
This is the dough after 2 hours. It's about twice as big.
I then split it into 12 pieces.
Working on the first half, I rolled them up.
And made my pretzel shape. At some point, I realized this isn't the actual pretzel shape as I need a spiral in the center, but I realized that during my second batch.
Dip them in the baking soda mixture and then put them on the baking sheet.
Let them rest another 15 minutes so they'll rise up.
And then put them in the oven and bake for about 10 minutes.
And voila.
So I melted some butter to coat the pretzels with, and then I put the toppings on. For the toppings I decided to try kosher salt (not quite as big as the real pretzel salt), a mix of cinnamon and sugar, and some garlic salt (with some marinara sauce).
Overall the pretzels were quite good. One thing that bothered me a bit was that they were a little crunchy on the bottom. This was just because the bottom of the pan got hot, and I don't really know what to do to solve this. Next time I think I'll try making some thicker pretzels to see if that helps.
The best topping was the garlic salt and marinara sauce. I think the pretzels just made damn good bread sticks and weren't as much of a soft pretzel as I hoped.
