Ham & Cheese Stuffed Pretzels with Chick-fil-a Sauce

Now that I am finally calming down from our Super Bowl win, I can post about the delicious snack I made for the game.  We have been waiting for this moment for a long time, so I decided to make something that I’ve been dreaming up for a long time….ham and cheese stuffed soft pretzels! YUM!

I have never made soft pretzels before, but I really wanted to give it a try, and boy am I glad I did!  It was fun and now that I’ve had some practice I have many more ideas of how to customize them!  But for now, I’ll share how I made these.

First off, I had to find a recipe, because like I said, I’ve never made these before.  So I used a recipe from here. It is identical to most soft pretzel recipes I found on other websites, but the directions were simple to follow.

This recipe called for:

• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• water
• 2 (1/4 ounce) packages active dry yeast
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 5 3/4 cups flour
• 1/4-1/2 cup flour, for kneading
• 3/4 cup baking soda
• 1 large egg, beaten with 1 tablespoon water
• coarse salt or flaky salt, for sprinkling (I used sea salt) 

You can follow the directions on the website, but here are some pictures to show you how things looked throughout the process.

The water & brown sugar mixture with the yeast foaming on top.

After adding the flour, you need to knead the dough. Haha!

Then, put the dough into a large bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and let it rise for 45 minutes.

Roll out the dough and cut it into 24 sections.  I used a pizza cutter to do this.

Roll the dough into 1/2" x 9" sticks.  The recipe called for putting them on parchment paper, but I didn't have that so I used foil and they were fine.

Then you have to give the pretzels a 30 second bath in a hot water/baking soda mixture.  The pretzels are then dried on a paper towel, put back on the cookie tray and painted with the egg mixture.  Finally, bake them for 10 minutes or less at 450 degrees.

Once the pretzels were finished baking I sliced them like you would a sub roll and stuffed them with ham and Swiss cheese (my fiancé chose pepper jack for his).  I put them back in the oven at 350 degrees for just long enough for the cheese to melt and then served them warm.  Oh my God, they were delicious!

Here it is all done with the Swiss cheese and mock Chick-fil-a sauce.

This is my fiancé's version, with the pepper jack.

Finally, I made the mock Chick-fil-a sauce, which I am now addicted to.  I should have never made this stuff, because its tastes just like the real thing!

To make the sauce mix the following ingredients together:

•      1/2 cup mayo
•       2 tbsp. mustard (regular prepared yellow mustard)
•       1/2 tsp. garlic powder
•       1 tbsp. vinegar
•       2 tbsp. honey
•       Salt and pepper, to taste

If you are using this in combination with the pretzels, then you definitely want to double, maybe even triple, the recipe!

Go enjoy!