Homemade Gluten Free Vegan Soft Pretzels Recipe

I've been off gluten for about 9 years at this point. And by this point, I've managed to find gluten free replacements for all the gluten things I loved, either store bought or homemade, but the two things I had yet to have and still missed were soft pretzels and licorice.

Well, I can knock that list down to one, because I made my own homemade soft pretzels, and they were totally awesome, and hit the spot. And they were vegan, and using only healthy (in my opinion) ingredients, and pretty cheap to make as well.

When I was trying to find a recipe to make, I found a bunch of different gluten free recipes, all that weren't vegan, but this recipe looked the most promising to me. I veganized it, and switched the corn syrup to jaggery syrup, and switched around the flours to use what I had at home, and it was terrific.

The outside is chewy, the inside is soft, and the taste is just right.

I will mention that while it is definitely possible to get it into pretzel shape, it is a pain to do that because the dough is finicky and does like to break, and even once it's already pretzel shape it can break, so if you aren't particular on having the pretzel shape, its much easier to just make pretzel sticks, and they taste the same. So after I made half the batch pretzel shaped, I just decided to do the rest in sticks, and it was awesome too.

Homemade Gluten Free Vegan Soft Pretzels Recipe

Ingredients
1 1/2 cup white rice flour
1 1/2 cup short grain rice flour
3/4 cup corn starch or potato starch
1 1/2-2 teaspoons xanthan gum
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 tablespoon ground flax seed
2 tablespoons boiling water
1/4 cup jaggery syrup, maple syrup, date syrup, or other syrup sweetener of choice
1 cup and 2 tablespoons warm water
2 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 cups boiling water
2 tablespoons baking soda
1 tablespoons jaggery syrup, maple syrup, date syrup, or other syrup sweetener of choice
Coarse salt
Mustard (optional)
Sweetener (optional)

Instructions:
1. Mix the ground flax seeds with 2 tablespoons boiling water and set aside.

2. Mix the 1/4 cup syrup with warm water, yeast, and oil and let sit for 5 minutes.

3. Mix the flours, starch, xanthan gum, salt, and baking powder until uniform.

4. Pour the yeast mixture and the flax mixture into the flour mixture, and mix until well combined. If needed, add another tablespoon of water, but it most likely won't need that.

5. Rub a little oil on your hands and coat the dough with the oil and set it to rise for 30 minutes. (P.S. Mine didn't really even rise, I think my kitchen was too cold, and it was totally fine, so its all cool if you don't see yours rising. I just included this since it was in the original recipe.)

6. Bring boiling water, baking soda, and 1 tablespoon syrup to a rolling boil.

7. Divide your dough into 10 equal pieces. Carefully make each one into a snake, via a combination of squeezing and rolling it until its long enough, then shaping it into a pretzel, making sure that if the dough breaks, that you squeeze it back together, and making sure it is well pressed into the pretzel shape. Alternatively, just form them into sticks around hand length (or whatever length you want).

8. Drop your pretzels, one or two at a time, into the boiling water (make sure its at a rolling boil) and wait until it floats. If it isn't floating after about a minute, take a spoon and push it around the bottom to make sure that the pretzel isn't stuck to the bottom. Once floating, remove from the pot and place on a lined baking tray. Repeat with the rest of them.

9. Sprinkle with salt. (Use much less salt than you think you'll need, because the salt ends up sticking more than you think it will.)

10. Bake at 425 for 15-17 minutes, or until browning. You decide how much you want it cooked for, but that's the amount of time that worked best for me.

11. Eat fresh dipped in mustard. I made a sweet mustard dipping sauce by mixing dijon mustard with jaggery syrup.

12. If not eating fresh, freeze and then defrost and toast before eating.

Enjoy!

Are you a fan of soft pretzels? How do you like to eat yours? Have you ever made or made gluten free ones? Does this look like a recipe you'd try?

P.S. If you do eat gluten, you can just follow the same techniques, but just use a gluten pizza crust recipe to make the pretzels instead of the gluten free dough.