A taste of Oktoberfest

I went to Oktoberfest last year. It was really quite awesome, so I thought it would be nice to recreate a little part of it in the form of pretzels. This is the recipe that I've used. Now all I need is a Maß of Hofbräu, a Bavarian brass band and a couple of pretty girls in Dirndln...

Pretzels (Take I)

Ingredients

• 400g Strong flour
• 1 sachet Fast-acting yeast
• 1.5tsp Salt
• 150ml Water
• 75ml Milk
• Coarse salt
• ~3tsp Bicarbonate of soda

Method

1. Mix the flour, yeast, salt, water and milk in a bowl and form a dough.
2. Knead the dough for ~20 minutes and leave to rise until doubled in size, covered.
3. Gently press the air out and knead the dough for ~10 minutes more. Divide into 4 equal portions.
4. Roll each portion out into a sausage shape, roughly 35cm long then shape into pretzel shapes.
5. Leave for ~45mins to prove.
6. Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Boil the pretzels individually for about a minute, then remove to a paper towel to dry.
7. Oil a baking sheet well.
8. Make a solution of bicarbonate of soda in a mugful of water. Dip each pretzel in the solution, sprinkle with the coarse salt and place on a well-oiled baking sheet.
9. Bake at 190C for 20-25 mins until dark golden brown.
10. Remove to a wire rack to cool.

There are enough photos of balls of dough up here already, so I didn't bother this time around. The first photo is from halfway through step 4 - our sausage shaped bits of dough.

And then the now (sort of) pretzel-shaped dough at the end of step 4. As you can see, I was experimenting a bit with variations on the shape. I'm not terribly happy with any of them actually - but we'll see how they look once they're baked!

But more importantly, I should have read the recipe a little more carefully. You're supposed to let it prove before shaping into pretzel shapes. Oops. Well, here's what happens if you don't (end of step 5). Ah well, you live and learn.
Ready for the oven (end of step 8).Unfortunately, there was a much bigger problem: I discovered that my oven is broken. So after about half an hour of the oven not warming up, I eventually managed to (sort of) bake the pretzels by using the still-functioning grill to heat the oven up. As a result, they're as much grilled as they are baked. Here's the final result.