♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Today on "America's Test Kitchen," Bridget and Julia make laugenbrezeln, Jack challenges Bridget to a tasting of artisanal American cheddar, and Julia and Bridget make beer-battered onion rings with jalapeño dipping sauce.

It's all coming up right here on "America's Test Kitchen."

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♪♪ -Pretzels are an integral part of daily life in Germany, whether you're swinging by the bakery to pick one up for breakfast or lunch, or enjoying one a little later with a beer and a good friend.

And today my good friend Bridget is gonna show us how to make German-style pretzels at home.

-Authentic brezeln.

-Mm.

Brezeln.

-Exactly.

They're really dark, almost a mahogany color.

Starts with a dough.

Very simple dough.

And we want pretzels that have a big chew, a little bit of tug to them, so we're using bread flour here.

And I'm really gonna highly recommend that you weigh your flour for this recipe.

You're gonna need a scale later on anyway.

So it's very important here.

This is 12 3/4 ounces of flour.

That's about 2 1/3 cups.

I'm gonna add a teaspoon of table salt and then a teaspoon of instant yeast, rapid-rise yeast, whatever you have.

-Mm-hmm.

-I'm just gonna mix these together.

All right, and I'm going to add a cup of room-temperature water.

Just room temperature.

We don't want to slow down the fermentation process.

And then 2 tablespoons of unsalted butter.

These have been softening.

Nice and soft, kind of squishy.

-Okay.

-They're gonna give a little bit of richness to the pretzel.

Okay, so this is gonna go onto the machine.

And now I'm gonna turn it to low speed just till this dough comes together.

It should only be a minute.

So the majority of the flour has been moistened.

Now at this point, because there's not a lot of loose flour in there, I can increase the speed.

Otherwise you get a big cloudburst of flour.

Increasing it to medium speed, and we're gonna let this go until the dough feels nice and smooth.

That's gonna take about six minutes.

All right.

Let's take a look at this dough.

Let me just put this out onto my countertop.

It's not floured.

We don't really need to flour it.

I'm just going to knead this briefly at this point.

All I need to do is kind of scoop this into a little round ball.

There we go.

And I've got a greased bowl here.

I'm gonna add it to the bowl.

I like to flip it upside down so that top is a little bit covered... -Mm-hmm.

-...with the vegetable-oil spray.

-So it doesn't dry out.

-Exactly.

Cover it tightly.

We're gonna leave this at room temperature until it's just about doubled in size.

And that's only gonna take about an hour.

-That's not long.

-Mnh-mnh.

All right, our dough has risen for about an hour.

So I'm just going to turn this out onto my counter.

You don't really need to manipulate this too much at this point.

We're going to make six pretzels today, so I need to cut this into six pieces.

So I'll cut it in half.

This is always where it gets a little tricky is thirds.

So what I do is I kind of just turn this into a cylinder.

Makes it easier to figure out thirds that way.

Okay, so that looks great.

So now I'm gonna need your help because what we're gonna do is we're going to shape these into a taut little ball here.

-Hmm.

-Really turn it in on itself.

Just like that.

Just want to put a damp cloth over these for about 10 minutes, let them relax before we try to shape them, roll them out towards a pretzel shape.

If we started to roll them out now, they're just gonna snap back like a nasty old teenager.

-[ Laughs ] Like a bad habit.

-That's exactly right.

So we'll leave these for 10 minutes and we'll come right back.

-All right.

-So I'm gonna take this first round of dough here.

I'm gonna place this first little dough ball seam side up right here.

And I'm just gonna use the palm of my hand to start flattening it out.

Get rid of any air bubbles.

So after I've kind of pressed this out, I'm going to just take my rolling pin and really knock out any remaining bubbles.

And then I just want to press this out to a 4x8-inch rectangle.

And now I'm going to take the end farthest away from me and start rolling it back to me.

-Mm-hmm.

-And I want to be pretty tight about this.

This is going to help to shape the structure and ensure that the pretzels retain that round shape.

All right, and there we go.

So now I'm going to pinch this really, really well.

All right, and now we're gonna start to roll this out to a 9-inch rope.

So I'm just gonna start to kind of work it out a little bit.

-Okay.

-Let's how we are.

-There you go.

How about that?

-All right, so this is going to go right back up here to our sleeping dough buns.

-I get it.

You're shaping them slowly... -That's right.

-...because they'll start to snap back 'cause you used bread flour, high protein content.

They're snappy.

-Exactly.

Exactly.

And you know, dough, when it starts to snap back, you really -- there's only one thing you can do.

Let it rest.

-Yep.

-Fantastic.

This one goes right here.

-All right.

-There we go.

Now we're gonna start back over on the first one that we did.

So it's had some time to rest... -Right.

-...before we move on.

All right, so now we're gonna take this 9-inch rope, and we're gonna turn it into a 28-inch rope.

-Wow!

-And because the rulers are usually only about 18 inches in length, this is what I have been doing at home.

I've just been taping a 28-inch space on my counter, so it's easy enough for me to see.

-That's pretty smart.

-So, again, gonna start at the middle and start working it out.

And you can see it just really wants to give up the ghost at this point.

But if it starts to really snap back, not a problem.

You just put the damp towel back onto it and let it rest for a few more minutes.

-Okay.

-Let's see.

-All right.

Nicely done.

-There we go.

We are making the beautiful Bavarian "U" pretzels.

So I'm gonna cross it over and I'm gonna cross it over again.

You don't want to do it halfway.

You want to do it just below halfway.

-Okay.

-That way you get some nice big what I call mouse ears.

When this comes over like that and you push it in like that and you separate that out like that, you get a nice-shaped pretzel.

Gonna place this pretzel right here.

So we've got a couple more to do... -Mm-hmm.

-...but we're gonna leave these here uncovered on the counter for about 10 minutes.

And after that I'm gonna cover these, put them into the fridge.

You want to leave them in there for at least two hours, but you can do this up to 24 hours in advance.

-Gotcha.

-Welcome to my laboratory.

-[ Laughs ] It is a little scary that I had to put all this on to make pretzels.

-Yeah, but this is a safe thing to do.

Authentic pretzels are dipped in a lye solution before they're baked, and that does so many things.

Gives them a beautiful deep color.

It kind of sets the exterior, gets that really shiny, taut exterior.

It gives it a really beautiful mineral flavor.

Lye is incredibly caustic.

And that's why we're dressed like this.

I mean, when you think about alkalis, we often think about baking soda.

And we do have a version that you can use that you don't need to get all suited up for at home, but baking soda has a much lower pH.

You're not gonna get the same results.

I think if you're in love with pretzels, you want to do this.

-Okay.

-All right.

These were in the fridge about two hours, and we're ready to move on to our dip.

So everything is about precision and weight.

So I've got a bowl here on my scale.

I mentioned before, it's always a good idea to weigh your flour.

And I want to measure 1,000 grams of water.

And you want to make sure that this water is on the cool side, because once the lye goes in there, it's going to kind of set off a heating reaction.

And heat in the water that we're going to dip in, it can cause the pretzels to kind of fall apart.

All right.

Boop.

-Oh, on the nose.

-All right.

This is lye.

It is a food-grade lye.

It's actually safe.

Once these are baked, it deactivates the lye, so there's no harm there.

But we've premeasured out 40 grams of the lye crystals.

And when I add it to the water -- and you always want to add the lye to the water and not the water to the lye because we want to make sure that this little bit of lye comes in contact with a big amount of water quickly.

If you do it in reverse, as you're adding the water it can actually cause a little bit more of a reaction.

So I'm just gonna stand with my head back a little bit and sprinkle in the 40 grams of lye right there.

As you can see, it doesn't really dissolve on its own very easily.

So I'm just gonna use a whisk.

-And the counters are covered too.

-Yeah, the counters are covered because whatever the lye mixture comes in contact, it can actually mar or mark the surface.

-Mm-hmm.

-And we don't want that.

Perfect.

-Mm-hmm.

-All right, so we want to put this face side down into the lye.

And we're gonna let this sit in there, kind of submerging it every once in a while, for about 15 seconds.

All right, I'm gonna move this to a wire rack set over a parchment-lined baking sheet.

We're gonna dip the rest.

Now these are going to be moved to our sheet pan.

I'm gonna start with the first one that was sitting there draining.

And you know, a silicone baking mat is really the best tool for the job here.

These tend to get really, really sticky.

Right, Julia, would you mind handing me that pretzel salt?

-Mm-hmm.

-Love pretzel salt.

This salt does not melt very easily when it gets wet.

And that's how you get those beautiful little coarse grains.

You can use kosher salt, but we've got more instructions on our website there.

They look fantastic.

Now, before we put these in the oven, we want to give our gloves a good rinsing because we're gonna handle the oven handle.

-Makes sense.

-I'm ready to bake these.

I'm gonna put these in a 475-degree oven.

We want these to get a really deep, dark color, and these are only gonna be in there for about 12 minutes.

-Soaking the pretzels in a lye solution before baking is crucial if you want them to have a shiny brown exterior.

Lye, or sodium hydroxide, makes a powerfully alkaline solution that chemically transforms the protein and starch on the surface of the pretzel.

When dipped into this solution, the dough's long protein chains break down into short chains and amino acids.

Meanwhile, the starch in the dough unravels and starts to gel.

Then, when the pretzel is baked, the alkalized dough transforms again.

The gelatinized starch on the surface sets into a smooth, glossy crust, and the wealth of amino acids readily take part in the Maillard reactions, giving the crust a deep brown color and unique pretzelly flavor.

And that's why lye is crucial if you want that authentic dark German pretzel style.

-Do not take off the gloves!

-[ Laughs ] Hi there.

-Leave the goggles on.

Don't take off the gloves 'cause we -- and I mean you -- have got to do some cleanup here.

-Oh, okay.

-Yeah.

We're gonna touch some of these things that had lye on it.

Just really good safety practice, until everything is put away, keep these on.

-Okay!

[ Both laugh ] And we have got all -- the entire procedure on our website so people can go on there and feel very safe about how to clean up.

-All right.

-Oh ho ho!

-Pretzel delivery.

-Goodness!

-These are absolutely beautiful, and you cannot get that color without that dip in the lye.

-Mnh-mnh.

-Mmm.

That was just 12 minutes in the oven.

But now we got to let 'em sit for five minutes just to let them set up a little bit.

But you can serve these at room temperature.

I guarantee they're absolutely gorgeous.

-All right.

I'm so ready to try these.

-I would love for you to try one.

You want to go for it?

-[ Laughs ] -I'm going to take one as well.

Now, depending on what part of Germany you're from or how you grew up eating these, some people eat them with softened butter.

I think that's delicious.

-Mmm.

-Of course sausages are always great.

Tear that open.

You can kind of smear it into the butter, or you can use this to spread.

-All right.

Oh ho ho ho ho ho!

Look at that.

That is gorgeous.

Mmm!

-Did you get it without the butter?

-Mm-hmm.

-Even without the butter.

-That's not like a pretzel I've ever had before.

I mean, this is proper bread.

-Yes.

I'm gonna show you what I like to serve these with.

-Okay.

-Be right back.

-Hmm!

[ Laughing ] That is awesome!

[ Laughs ] -How about that?

-Cheers.

-Prost!

-Prost!

Thank you for the pretzels.

-Absolutely.

-There you have it.

If you want to make traditional German-style pretzels, divide the dough and let it rest before shaping into pretzels.

Protect the kitchen surfaces and yourself before dipping the pretzels in a lye solution, and bake in a very hot oven until dark brown and glossy.

From "America's Test Kitchen," a terrific recipe for laugenbrezeln.

Ha ha!

You know how to get to my heart right here.

♪♪ -Do you get excited by Emmenthaler?

Do you flip out over feta?

Do you go gonzo for Gorgonzola?

Well, you might be a real cheese lover like me, 'cause I think cheddar can make anything better.

And I'm really lucky because Jack's here with some beautiful artisanal cheeses.

-Yeah, so these are all handmade.

These are American cheddars.

-Okay.

-Now, I know your, you know, your whole... -That's all right.

-...you know, British Island thing.

-Whatever.

-Okay.

But these are beautiful cheeses.

They're really diverse.

So you're gonna see all kinds of flavors.

The biggest thing that you're gonna immediately notice, especially if you look at the board here, is most of these are block cheddars, meaning they're aged in plastic.

A couple of them are clothbound.

And you can see these fissures -- or blemishes as they call them in the business -- is an indication it's clothbound.

So it is what it sounds like.

They wrap fabric around the cheese, coat it in melted lard, and then age it that way.

Now, what that does is you get much more variety of texture from the exterior to the interior.

It's drier.

It can be more crumblier than a block-aged cheese, which is in plastic, so it's not losing moisture during the aging process.

And you can get some oxygen that gets in there.

-Right.

-And that's what's causing these blemishes.

Totally fine to eat.

They're actually, for some people, the best part of the cheese.

It's a little horseradishy, a little blue cheesy.

-Mmm!

-So you started with the orange cheese.

-Mm-hmm.

-The difference here is they're adding flavorless annatto oil, from the achiote seed, that gives it the distinctive color.

We've actually done taste tests where we blindfolded each other.

You can't actually tell it's an orange cheese unless you're looking at it.

-Right.

Right.

I hope not.

-So there's been a new style that's been emerging, and it's kind of got a sort of sweet, kind of sharp thing going.

-Mm-hmm.

-It's best known by Beecher's, which started out in Seattle, or Milton Creamery and Prairie Breeze in Iowa.

Any impressions here of things that you are gravitating towards or differences you're noticing?

-I like having a couple different kinds of cheddar on a cheese board because they are so different.

I love this one.

I love the crystalline structure in there.

I probably wouldn't want to cook with any of these, because I'm imagining the budget for these is a little bit on the upside.

You just want to enjoy them with a piece of bread.

-Yeah, these are all $20 to $35 a pound.

-I'm not cooking with them.

-Also they're aged too long.

If you want to cook with a cheddar cheese, you actually want a younger cheese.

It's gonna hold better.

It's also less expensive.

Other things you're noticing here on the table.

-This one's incredibly buttery.

Lovely.

Silky and smooth.

Little bit of tang.

I'm not supposed to find fault here, am I?

Because it's like trying to find a date and they all look like Tom Selleck.

-[ Laughs ] -Does this one have a little bit of that sweet profile in it?

-Yeah, the sweet profile kind of reminds me sometimes of caramel or butterscotch.

-Mm-hmm.

-It's like it's a complex sweetness.

It's not just sweet.

I like them all.

I have some favorites, But I'm curious what your impression's here and if you had a favorite on the table.

-I think my favorite is this one.

-Okay.

-I love that little bit of crunchy bits... -Yeah.

-...in a really, really well-aged cheddar.

-So those crunchy bits are the same crunchy bits that are, like, in Parmigiano.

-Exactly.

-It's from long aging.

And it's a sign that this cheese has had a very nice, well-tended life before it ended up on your cheese plate.

-And this one was clothbound and wrapped in lard, and that's how I want to go as well, so I really like that one.

-Duly noted.

-Mm-hmm.

-Yeah, you can tell that that's the crumblier cheese.

And in fact, why don't you flip that over?

That is the clothbound cheese.

This is from Vermont.

It's Cabot and in partnership with Jasper Hill.

-Lovely.

-And I love the texture of this cheese.

Wonderful.

-I would love to try and see what this one is.

-We're going to the Midwest.

-Ahh!

-So this is Milton Creamery, Prairie Breeze.

It is a good example of that sweet, sulfury, complex balanced sort of new style of cheddar that's become popular.

It's a little bit creamier than the first cheeses that we were talking about, and delicious.

-These two were almost tied for me, but I'll go -- I'll stick with the color thing here and go with this one.

-Yeah, so this one I chose, it's from Wisconsin, small business called Widmer's.

But they're using the same cultures that you would use in an alpine cheese.

-Oh.

-So Emmenthaler or Gruyère.

And it has a little bit of those buttery notes.

-Right.

-I think that was something you were referencing.

So it's cheddar but not cheddar.

Last but not least, the orange cheddar.

I think a lot of times people think orange cheddars are simpler or less complex.

And I would say no.

This is a super interesting, complex cheese, well aged, made in Wisconsin.

-These are all incredibly good.

And it proves the point, cheddar makes everything better.

-It does.

-Well, if you'd like to learn more about all these beautiful cheddars, we have all of that information on our website.

Definitely go take a look.

And I'm gonna take a bite.

♪♪ When onion rings are great -- and I do mean great -- they're crispy, craggy, crunchy on the outside, and inside, they're tender.

They're definitely not raw.

A lot can go wrong with making onion rings, but Madame Onion Ring is here.

-[ Laughs ] -Julia is gonna show us how to make great onion rings at home.

-That's right, and unlike French fries, which can be really tricky to get just right at home, onion rings are blissfully easy and they taste so much better than what you can get at most restaurants because the coating we have perfected.

-Awesome.

-All right.

But I'm also gonna serve it with a little dipping sauce.

So here we have some mayonnaise.

This is 1/2 cup of mayonnaise.

Little bit of ketchup.

About 3 tablespoons.

Now here are the jarred jalapeños.

2 tablespoons of them.

You want to chop them up.

Just give them a quick run over with a knife.

So this is actually some of the brine from the jar, a tablespoon of that.

That adds a lot of, obviously, spiciness but some good salt as well.

So to counteract the salt, 1/2 a teaspoon of sugar.

And a little more kick, a little cayenne, about a 1/4 of a teaspoon.

And that's it.

On to the star of the whole show -- the onions.

These are big onions.

-Yeah, they are.

-You want big onions because you want to have a lot of good onion ring size.

Usually when I prep vegetables, I try to get every usable scrap out of the thing, but when you're making onion rings, we're gonna be pretty picky because we want perfect onion rings.

So I'm slicing about a 1/2 inch off each end.

I'm gonna cut them into nice big 1/2-inch rings.

All right.

Into a big bowl we go.

One more trick.

These little guys in the middle... -Mm-hmm.

-...they don't make great onion rings because they trap a bunch of the batter in there, and they just turn soggy.

So these center bits, they're going in our trim bowl for something else.

-Okay.

-It's about the first three rings, but you can really eye it.

On to this next step, which is really unusual for an onion ring recipe.

So here I have a tablespoon of confectioners' sugar, which really brings out the onion flavor.

-Got it.

-We're gonna add a little bit of cornstarch.

That's 2 teaspoons of cornstarch.

And a little bit of salt.

A teaspoon and a half.

Just a teaspoon of onion powder.

Again, reinforces that onion flavor.

Tablespoon of this we're gonna toss on the onions.

And the rest of this is gonna go into the batter.

-All right.

-So here, over here I'm gonna take a tablespoon, sprinkle it over the onions.

And that cornstarch obviously helps dry out the onions.

That's pretty good.

Let those sit.

Last bit of business is making the batter.

-Okay.

-We're gonna make a beer batter.

-Mmm!

-You want to add the beer right before you fry because that reaction, the bubbles in the beer and the leavener we're gonna put in here, you want that to be nice and frothy.

-Okay.

-So here I have some flour.

2 cups of all-purpose flour.

We're gonna add some cornstarch.

3 tablespoons of cornstarch.

-Ah, a little of both.

-That's right.

Last but not least, some baking powder -- 2 teaspoons.

So you're gonna whisk this together.

And as I mentioned, we're gonna add the rest of this mixture.

-Love it.

-Yeah, and that is it.

We are ready to go.

All we need to do now is refrigerate that sauce and get the oil heated up, and we're frying.

I have 2 quarts of vegetable oil over medium-high heat.

We're looking for a temperature of 380 degrees.

And that's a little higher than your average frying temperature that we use around here, which is usually 350.

But these cook pretty fast, they're pretty thin, and you want some good browning.

-Okay.

-So we'll let that heat away.

Now it's time to finish the batter with the promised beer.

Now, when you're choosing a beer for this -- this is 2 cups of beer -- you want a mild lager.

-Mm-hmm.

-You just want to whisk it in.

A few lumps are fine, but you want it mostly smooth.

All right, that looks pretty good.

Now we are going to fry these onion rings in batches because we want them to be perfect.

-Mm-hmm.

-So we need to take about a quarter of the onions, add them to the batter.

All right.

Those look good.

Our oil is at 380 on the nose.

Now we're gonna add the onions to the oil.

You can use your fingers or a pair of tongs.

Something really fun about using your fingers.

All right, so these are gonna fry about four minutes.

Gonna turn them occasionally so they brown nice and evenly.

And you're gonna monitor the temperature of the oil.

It's gonna dip down now that we added the cold onions.

But you want to maintain an oil temperature between 360 and 375.

Because if you go much hotter than that, the onions actually overcook on the inside, and you're left with one of those hollow onion rings.

So 380 is the magic number, between 360 and 375 while you cook.

All right, it's been about four minutes since I added that first one.

Look at that.

Gorgeous.

-Beautiful!

-Yeah.

So I'm gonna let this oil come back to 380 before we fry the next batch.

-Okay.

-And these I'm gonna keep warm in a 200-degree oven.

-Okay.

-Isn't that a beautiful sight?

-That's gorgeous.

-[ Laughs ] I'm gonna put a little sauce on your plate.

You can grab with your fingers if you want.

-All right, well, I want.

-All right.

Just two?

-No!

-How demure.

-Gorgeous!

-First without the sauce, just to taste the pure onion ring.

-All right.

-Mmm!

And look, you can bite through the onion.

It's still there, but you don't have to pull the onion out with your teeth, and then you're left with a shell.

And it tastes like onions.

-But it's not strong raw onion.

-Mnh-mnh.

-It's cooked through.

There's a really nice sweetness too.

That batter is insane.

-It's so good.

-Isn't that good?

It's so crisp.

Well, if you were having company over and you brought this to the table, their jaws would drop.

-Mm-hmm.

-'Cause you just don't get this quality.

-They need to name a kingdom after you.

-[ Laughs ] -You're definitely gonna want to make these onion rings at home.

And it starts by seasoning the onions with salt, onion powder, and confectioners' sugar.

Use both flour and cornstarch in the batter to make nice crisp onion rings.

And then fry them at 375 to allow for plenty of browning.

So, from "America's Test Kitchen," the very best beer-battered onion rings with jalapeño dipping sauce.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season, along with product reviews and select episodes, and those are all on our website, AmericasTestKitchen.com.

Nice.

I thought I was gonna look down and they were all gonna be gone.

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