Strawberry Pretzel Salad | Swanky Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is pretzel salad made of? ›

It's made with a buttery pretzel crust that is topped with a light yet tangy cream cheese filling and finished off with a sweet strawberry Jell-O topping. This layered dessert is a classic recipe perfect for potlucks, summer BBQs, and more!

The best way to ensure the crust holds together is to finely crush the pretzels. If your crumb mixture has large chunks or a lot of uneven crumbs, your crust won't hold together as well.

What is strawberry fluff? Strawberry fluff is a simple dessert made by combining strawberry jello, whipped topping, crushed pineapple, sweetened condensed milk, and fresh strawberries. It is mixed and then served chilled.

Lye. The dough is simple; take a basic yeast-risen dough that can be readied in an afternoon. But the trick to great pretzels is dipping the pretzels in a liquid wash before baking — and not just any wash, but a combination of water and lye. That's what gives pretzels their terrific color, texture and flavor.

Traditional Bavarian pretzels are dipped in a lye solution before they are baked. Lye, also known as sodium hydroxide, is essentially the same stuff that's used to make soap and clean drains. It can even dissolve glass.

While regular salted pretzels typically don't have much added sugar or saturated fat, chocolate-covered or otherwise sugar-sweetened pretzels may have a lot. This is especially true for pretzels with added butter or a cinnamon-sugar coating.

Soft pretzels and flavored pretzels are usually higher in calories, salt, sugar, and fat than hard pretzels, so you may want to limit your intake of those varieties.

Drizzle a small amount of water over the pretzel so that the pretzel is moist but not soggy. Wrap your pretzel in aluminum foil and place it in the oven for five minutes.

How do you get peanut butter inside a pretzel? ›

Using a sharp knife, score each rope down the middle to create a trench, making sure not to cut all the way through. Using a spoon, spread 2 tablespoons Peanut Butter & Co. Smooth Operator into the bottom of the trench. Carefully fold the two halves back together, and firmly pinch the seam shut.

Lye has a pH of around 13 whereas baking soda has a pH of around 8. This extra alkalinity accelerates the Maillard reaction, allowing that caramelization to develop on the exterior of the pretzels. That ultra-deep color and slightly crispy, crunchy exterior crust is only made possible with lye.

Yes, and no. Gelatin is a neutral product that is used to set up your dessert. Jello-O is a brand name of gelatin mixed with sugar and flavors to make your dessert.

If you find white fluffy stuff on your berries that looks a bit like cotton candy, that is mold. Mold is a fungus with spores that feed on the berries and grow thin threads that can look like fluff or cotton. This particular type of mold is common among fruits and is known as Botrytis fruit rot or gray mold.

Soft pretzels can usually be baked in 15 minutes; hard pretzels, meanwhile, must be baked for up to an hour. The longer baking time further dries out the pretzel. And, as we have discussed, the lack of moisture is what gives the hard pretzel its brittle texture.

The traditional pretzel shape is a distinctive symmetrical form, with the ends of a long strip of dough intertwined and then twisted back onto itself in a particular way (a pretzel loop or pretzel bow). Today, pretzels come in a wide range of shapes.

Pretzels may be better than some fatty chips, but four out of five nutrition experts surveyed by Time say if you're trying to eat healthy, pretzels shouldn't be your go-to snack. Although pretzels are low-fat, they are also pretty paltry on the protein and fiber front, and they can be quite high in sodium and carbs.

Malt Syrup (the kind used for beer) and dipping them in a hot alkaline solution (baking soda or food grade lye and hot water) after baking for about 20–30 seconds gives a pretzel its characteristic flavor and distinctive brown coloring. The alkaline solution is a big contributor to the pretzel flavor.