Nibble Pretzels

1. Put both flours, butter, honey and salt in a bowl. Crumble the yeast in the warm water and dissolve in it while stirring. Pour into the flour mixture and roughly knead everything with the dough hook of the hand mixer. Then place the somewhat coarse dough on a work surface and knead with your hands to form a smooth, supple dough. Shape it into a ball, put it back in the bowl and seal it with aluminum foil. Just switch on the lighting in the oven, put the bowl in and let the dough rise there for at least 30 – 40 minutes. It should have doubled in volume.
2. Then knead the dough again vigorously on a well-floured surface (it must not stick) and then roll it out to about 5 mm thick. Cut out the small pretzels with a “pretzel cutter”. Knead, roll out and cut out the remaining dough a little again until all of the dough is used up. Then place pretzels individually on a perforated ladle and soak in the lye for about 10 seconds (explanation at the end of the recipe). Drain well and place on a baking sheet lined with baking paper. Grind the pretzel salt for the small pretzels a little finer and sprinkle them a little with it.
3. Preheat the oven to 180 °. Bake pretzels for 15-20 minutes. Since there are two trays, bake all the pretzels first. They then have the typical brown color due to the lye, but are still soft. But in order to be able to nibble them, they still have to be dried in the oven.
4. To do this, switch the oven to 80 ° and a maximum of 90 °, replace the baking paper on the tray and now place all the pretzels close together. When the tray is in the oven, the door must not be completely closed, so you put a wooden trowel or something in between so that the moisture that arises during drying can escape through the gap. This can take 3 hours under certain circumstances, then you are “nibble-ready” ……… ;-)))
5. The buckwheat flour gives them a slightly different taste than conventional salt pretzels. You can of course replace the amount with more spelled flour or even use any flour you like. ….. rye, whole grain or even just wheat etc.
6. The above quantity of ingredients resulted in approx. 45 pieces.

About the lye:

1. For 1 liter of soda lye you can either: Dissolve 50 g of Kaiser soda in 1 liter of boiling water. In this case, the pastry is immersed in the HOT lye for approx. 10 seconds. or dissolve 35 – 40 g of pretzel pearls in 1 liter of cold water. Here the pastry is immersed in the COLD lye for 10 seconds. This lye can be used several times.