Recipe Failure #1: Whole Wheat Pretzels

Expectation: That the recipe in my new King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking book would make delicious pretzels. Or even just ok-tasting pretzels.

While looking through my new book on Memorial Day, we got this great idea to tackle the whole wheat pretzel recipe and have a tasty day-off pretzel dinner (inspired by this article in the NY Times). We were so excited about it that we went to Whole Foods and bought $50 worth of ingredients: a huge bag of bread flour, yeast, barley malt extract (which I had to get five separate employees to help me find), various kinds of mustard, Gouda, apples and turkey (to make pretzel sandwiches), pub cheese, and sunflower and pumpkin seeds (to sprinkle on top).

We got home and got to work. We even decided to double the recipe because it only makes eight and we had big plans for our tasty dinner. After mixing a bunch of things together, the recipe said to let the dough rise until it has doubled in size, about an hour and a half. We waited patiently, entertaining ourselves and trying to ignore our hunger. An hour passed and the dough hadn't moved an inch. I made sure it was nice and warm under a bright light, and we waited a bit more and the dough stayed the same.

Now, this is my first experience baking with yeast, so I decided to Google "my dough didn't rise" and get some tips on how to "proof yeast to make sure it's still active." We tried this and, as you can see in the picture, it looked as if the yeast we originally worked with was not active (glass on the right), but another new packet that we had was still good (glass on the left). So, we decided to try again.

This time, we only made one batch and paid careful attention to the instructions. Everything was going smoothly, and we set it out to rise again. Meanwhile, I decided to try making crackers out of the first batch of failed dough, and rolled that out into thin squares and baked those. Once again, the new batch of pretzel dough did not rise. And, to make matters worse, the crackers were not good. So, we ordered pizza.

We couldn't help but think that there must be a problem with the recipe, since we did exactly what it said! But, this was my first experience working with yeast, so it's possible I have a lot of learning to do...