A New Twist on Pretzels?

Our Ranch Pretzel Sticks!

Pretzels have a long history in many countries, starting out as a simple twists of dough and becoming part of the multibillion dollar snack food industry. The hard pretzels are arguably more popular now than the soft baked originals. Now you can find plethora of pretzel shapes and flavors. Do you like the butter twists or the original salty twists? Flavored pretzels from local, small mom and pop shops have been making their way to grocery store shelves and seem to have developed a cult following. 

Adding flavorful seasoning to bland snacks is nothing new. Heck, moms everywhere have been making different varieties of Chex Mix forever. People love the convenience of buying snacks at the store and having them ready whenever and wherever. I recently fell in love with a flavored pretzel stick, but was somewhat disappointed by the price and availability. Right now, we are living through unprecedented times of inflation and supply chain madness. So, I figured it was time to head to the test kitchen to see just how easy it could be to get my favorite snack made right here at home.

Since my favorite flavored pretzel right now is ranch, I started with that as my initial test run. I decided to buy a bag of twisted pretzel sticks rather than the straight sticks, thinking the twist might hold more flavoring. I scoured the web for recipes, reviews, tips and tricks to guide my initial test of the flavored pretzel. I also wondered how I could keep these fresh and in individual serving sizes. I am all about prepping and saving food (because it's expensive!). 

I did a lot of research into various recipes. A lot of people out there have the same idea as me! There were hundreds of ranch pretzel recipes. The main difference was the base of the mix-some called for oil and others for melted butter. We decided to use the packet of Hidden Valley Ranch seasoning to coat the pretzels. So, we took it to the test kitchen! 

I split the recipe in half and split the 15 oz bag of pretzels in half. We wanted to test a few different variables today.

Pan 1: Pretzels, 1/2 cup oil, 1.5 tablespoons of ranch seasoning and generous cracked black pepper

Pan 2: Pretzels, 1/2 cup melted butter, 1.5 tablespoons of ranch seasoning (no pepper on this one)

We baked both pans in the oven at 275 for 20 minutes. I happened to have a few teenage boys around the house and they gave me their official blog review. We all preferred the taste of the oil based pan but both were absolutely delicious and a good copycat recipe for our elusive pretzel snacks. 

The recipes said the seasoned pretzels would stay fresh for a few days, so I took part of the batch and vacuum sealed a few bags. I figured that might prevent us from eating them all today! They were that good!

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