Oktoberfest: breakfast of champions
We (along with most everyone else in Munich) are hosting a lot of house guests these days. Seems like as good a time as any to add to my breakfast-making repertoire. Plus, I like to make up recipes. Our most recent guests (the delightful Redenii) inspired this experiment with their love of German pretzels. We had a few left over one day, and I was trying to figure out what to do with them before they went stale. At the same time, I was thinking about the next day’s breakfast, which was possibly going to be french toast. You can probably figure out where this is going.
The pretzels presented a couple challenges that regular bread does not. Firstly, they are quite crusty, making it difficult for the egg mixture to penetrate them. We considered slicing the pretzels in half to remedy this, but quickly realized that none of us had such slicing skills. I ended up poking lots of fork holes into the pretzels and then soaking them in the egg mixture overnight. My fingers were crossed that this would be enough to get them hydrated but not overly so.
Second problem: due to their shape, it is difficult to soak the pretzels in an efficient manner. We tried to minimize this problem by squishing the pretzels 2 at a time into the smallest possible tupperware containers. We had two containers that held 2 pretzels each; I only made enough egg mixture to fill one of the containers at a time, so every few hours I took them out of the fridge and poured the liquid from one container to the other. Each pretzel got to spend at least 4 hours immersed in the mixture.
For the egg mixture I used 6 eggs, around a cup of milk, lots of ground cinnamon, and a pinch of ground cardamom. After soaking the pretzels overnight we had plenty of egg mixture left over which could be used to french-toast-ify additional, more traditional things (such as slices of bread) in the morning.
When we took the pretzels out of the fridge in the morning, they looked wrinkly and were difficult to pry apart from each other, but with a little coaxing we got them out of the tupperware and into a buttery frying pan. We served them with blueberry sauce (frozen blueberries, arrowroot powder, maple syrup, and a little water heated together on the stove). Big hit. The combination of crispy and soft, salty and sweet made for an exquisite breakfast. Can’t wait to make them again. But what to call them? French pretzels? French toast pretzels? Knots of breakfasty deliciousness? Help me out here.
