Thanks to my baking group, Baked Sunday Mornings, I recently discovered the joy of strawberry Jell-O salad with pretzel crust. The wonderful salty-creamy-crunchy-sweet character of the Jell-O salad got me wondering about other pretzel desserts I've been missing; I have used pretzels in several types of cookies (see, e.g., here, here, and here), but that's about the extent of my pretzel use in baking applications. I found a recipe on the Food and Wine website that I decided to try: Outrageous Pretzel Bars.
One reason I was interested in this recipe is that it calls for "hard pretzels," which I assumed meant hard sourdough pretzels. Since these pretzels are much crunchier than the thin pretzels I normally use in baking, I was curious to see how this would affect the end product. The pretzel bars are have a layer of something analogous to chocolate chip cookie dough on the bottom (butter, dark brown sugar, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking soda, salt, and chocolate chips), followed by a creamy chocolate layer (condensed milk and melted chocolate chips), and are topped with crushed hard pretzels that have been tossed with melted butter and a little sugar. You spread the first two layers in a pan, sprinkle on the pretzels, and then bake.
The bottom layer of these bars rose quite a bit, but only around the edges of the pan -- so the middle part of the pan was sunken in comparison. After the bars were cool, cutting them was slightly messy. I had not pressed the pretzels pieces into the chocolate layer before baking, but merely sprinkled them on top. As a result, quite a few pretzel pieces were loose and fell off during cutting. In addition, the chocolate layer is not firm at all -- it's the consistency of frosting and it tended to squish out when I applied pressure with a knife to the hard pretzel pieces on top of it.
These bars were not what I was expecting at all. I thought they would be a chocolate chip cookie topped with a brownie and pretzels. But the bottom layer was the consistency of cake, not a cookie. And the middle layer was not like a brownie at all, but creamy. That said, these bars were really delicious! The flavor of the bottom layer is fairly indistinct, but the chocolate flavor in the bars comes through clearly. The best part was the salty, crunchy, buttered pretzels. Using hard sourdough pretzels makes these bar supercrunchy and outrageously tasty.
Recipe: "Outrageous Pretzel Bars" from foodandwine.com.
One reason I was interested in this recipe is that it calls for "hard pretzels," which I assumed meant hard sourdough pretzels. Since these pretzels are much crunchier than the thin pretzels I normally use in baking, I was curious to see how this would affect the end product. The pretzel bars are have a layer of something analogous to chocolate chip cookie dough on the bottom (butter, dark brown sugar, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, baking soda, salt, and chocolate chips), followed by a creamy chocolate layer (condensed milk and melted chocolate chips), and are topped with crushed hard pretzels that have been tossed with melted butter and a little sugar. You spread the first two layers in a pan, sprinkle on the pretzels, and then bake.
These bars were not what I was expecting at all. I thought they would be a chocolate chip cookie topped with a brownie and pretzels. But the bottom layer was the consistency of cake, not a cookie. And the middle layer was not like a brownie at all, but creamy. That said, these bars were really delicious! The flavor of the bottom layer is fairly indistinct, but the chocolate flavor in the bars comes through clearly. The best part was the salty, crunchy, buttered pretzels. Using hard sourdough pretzels makes these bar supercrunchy and outrageously tasty.
Recipe: "Outrageous Pretzel Bars" from foodandwine.com.
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