Pretzel Crunch

This recipe comes from the Milk Momofuku Milk Bar by Christina Tosi. Like every recipe I’ve tried from this book it’s got something complicated or unusual about it – but yet it’s always really delicious so I keep taking on the challenges. And so with that, we begin pretzel recipe #2 for pretzel week.

Think of this recipe as something to add to your football snack spread. You’re going to shovel handfuls of this like you might for popcorn or Chex Mix. What’s we will be doing with this recipe is coating and baking-on delicious ingredients on to crushed pretzels. It’s salty, crunch, sweet, and buttery. Really buttery. Uncomfortably butter. So buttery that you shouldn’t think about how much butter is in the recipe. But it’s the holidays, so everything has butter. Why fight it?

Now, this is not as incredibly easy as reindeer noses, but it is a really easy recipe. So, buy a bag of pretzels and use half for reindeer noses and half for this crunch. It’s delicious and people will thank you.

Ingredients:

2 cups mini pretzels

1/4 cup brown sugar, packed

2 tbsp sugar

1/4 milk powder

1 tbsp barley malt powder (this is the unusual ingredient that I had to buy but makes me made I use so little)

7 tbsp melted butter (sometimes I use 6 because the one less tbsp makes me feel better)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 275°. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2. In a large bowl, use your hands to crunch up the pretzels. You want small pieces – not dust – just small pieces. You want it to look like what’s left on the bottom of a bag of pretzels.

3. Add the brown sugar, granulated sugar, milk powder, and malt powder to the pretzels. Stir to coat all the pretzels. You will have some powder left on the bottom of the bowl.

4. Pour in the melted butter. Stir to coat everything. The butter will make a clumpy paste with the powder – that’s what you want even though it’s not that pretty to look at. Stir until everything has been moistened.

5. Pour out your pretzel mix onto the baking sheet. Spread it out in an even layer across the sheet (it likely won’t cover the whole thing).

6. Bake for 20 minutes. It will smell buttery and toasty and be a little golden brown.

7. Let cool, then break up into bite size chunks.

8. Put it in a bowl and pretend you’re going to share with others.

Messy Level: This is two spoons, and the reason being that milk powder is messy! I find it just like flour because it puffs up and gets all over my hands and clothes. Also, at the end when you break the pretzel mix into chunks you’ll end up with a lot of crumbs. It’s not terribly messy, I’m just warning you for clean up time.