Soft, chewy pretzels + obatzda

Twist and shout: gluten-free pretzels so good they could fool professional pretzel bakers—plus a traditional German cheese/chive/beer dip

Gluten-free pretzels with a soft, chewy center and salty golden crust—no lye required, just deeply satisfying flavor from an easy-to-make dough.

Soft pretzels always felt like something other people had (like so many gluten-free treats). Baseball and carnival food, or a quick snack from a New York City food cart selling them warm on the street corner on a cold day. It’s easily been 35 years since I’ve had one—partly because I just didn’t think it was possible with GF flours so I never dived in to try. With a little research, trial and error, and some inventiveness of my own, these are some killer pretzels I came up with.

This recipe makes a dough that bakes up chewy but not tough. Deeply golden, with that pretzel-y flavor that comes from a quick bath in alkaline water that gives them their distinctive flavor. I didn’t want to mess with lye, so I used baking soda, the commonly used alternative. While researching, I found an article from 2010 by Harold McGee on how to boost the alkalinity of baking soda by baking it—or as McGee put it “you can cook up a more muscular and versatile alkali”. For those who want to know the science: you are creating sodium carbonate from sodium bicarbonate, and it boosts the ability of the solution to give the pretzels their beautiful burnished color without handling a chemical that is so strong it can be used to open clogged pipes in your kitchen sink (McGee goes into more detail).

Obatzda if you like cheese, you will love this traditional German cheese spread/dip to eat with the pretzels. It’s got all of my favorite flavors: onion, chive, caraway (optional, but so good), butter, paprika, and beer. It’s hard to stop eating, and I cannot wait to make it for my cheese-loving family the next time we are all together. An array of cheeses and spreads is our love language and this one makes me weak in the knees.

From top: weighing dough; shaping in braid and 'baguette', shaping birds, cooking in alkaline bath, egg washing pretzels, baked pretzels

Notes: the additional potato starch adds chew and moisture, balancing the structure provided by the psyllium and egg. It helps create that classic pretzel texture — chewy on the inside with a golden crust.

Pretzels often have malted grain in the flour mix, but I didn’t have a GF source. To approximate the hint of flavor it adds, I used a combination of honey and toasted oat flour.

I tested a batch without xanthan; it works, but making some of the twists is challenging as the dough doesn’t hold together quite as well. Strongly recommend using it.

Ingredient substitutions: you can make this recipe without egg, xanthan, added potato flour or toasted oat flour (sub extra GF flour for either or both), but the results won’t be as good I think. I used both active dry and instant yeasts; both work the same, just a slight difference in quantity and mixing method (detailed in recipe).

Decorative cuts in pretzel dough: You’ll need to use the sharpest knife you have! Or you can also use an X-acto knife or a straight-edge razor blade as bread bakers use. The cuts are not only decorative, but they act just as cuts in a sourdough loaf do—to help the dough expand in a predictable direction.

Obatzda ingredients, baked pretzels with obatzda