Pretzel #20: Homemade Halloween

Burning Barrel, Placerville, CA

There are only 10 more shopping days until Halloween. When I was a kid, this wouldn’t have meant anything. It’s not that I didn’t care about Halloween; far from it. But rather, it’s just that we didn’t “shop” for Halloween. I suppose mom bought a bag of candy to hand out to the trick-or-treaters, and we usually got a single pumpkin to carve with a steak knife. But we didn’t buy decorations. We just hauled out the same, dog-eared, cardboard, jointed skeleton and hung it on the front door. And in terms of costumes, my brother and I just cobbled together a “hobo” costume each year using old clothes and charcoal to smudge our faces.

I read that today’s average American household spends about $285 on Halloween. And for a household with children, that amount rises to $652. What on earth are these people buying?? Judging from my son and daughter-in-law’s household–that now includes a child–the money goes toward 12-foot-tall skeletons and animated, singing pumpkins. Oh, and they give out full-size, name-brand candy bars to the neighborhood kids. My dad used to make sure that each kid got one and only one generic black taffy. My how the world has changed.

For today’s pretzel I went to a place called Burning Barrel Brewery and Spirits, in Placerville. It’s a comfortable place, with a big, open dining area filled with unique, burl-topped tables and a shady patio area with picnic benches. It’s owned by a father-and-son team, which is cool.

But this place doesn’t really seem to have quite figured out what it wants to be. It’s a small-batch distillery (with impressive copper distilling equipment on display); it’s a restaurant with a serviceable kitchen; it’s a pub with a bar counter and taps dispensing beer they make in a separate facility in Rancho Cordova. And lucky for us, they are also a purveyor of pretzels.

So I got me their “Bavarian Pretzel served with house-made beer cheese and creole mustard dip.”

The first thing that strikes you is this is as big as the spare tire on your Prius. (And for $16 it ought to be!) I confess that this was too big for me to finish. And as you can see from the photo, I only had a dinky 12-ounce beer to go with it.

This seems to be another of those pretzels that is brushed with butter prior to baking. I’m not fundamentally opposed to this treatment, but I do object if the butter-brushing is meant to substitute for the alkaline bath. And I suspect that’s what’s going on here. This pretzel lacks that classic pretzel taste. It’s not bad-tasting, mind you; it has a melt in your mouth texture, kind of like an Auntie Anne’s. But a purist would never mistake it for a proper Bavarian pretzel.

I also think this pretzel would have benefited if it had been baked a little longer. If I closed my eyes I could imagine I was eating heated, raw dough. Perhaps the dough was too thick to bake properly??  The color seemed a bit too light, and there was no cracking in the surface.

This pretzel also seemed to lack flavor. If it weren’t for the butter and salt, the pretzel would be bland indeed. The key to eating this really lies in coating it with the beer cheese and mustard.

Alas, the beer cheese was kind of mayonnaise-y and lacking in beer flavor. The mustard is good though. It was quite spicy–not “hot,” but “spicy brown.” I’m still not sure what makes this “creole.” Was it horseradish-based? It certainly clears the sinuses.

Three stars for this pretzel. You could do better.

PRETZEL TRIVIA

Quick, what is this?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s a drawing from US Patent #3,538,840, in 1970.

The patent was awarded to two brothers–Richard and Walter Nelson–who were trying to develop a new snack food. They sawed a pretzel rod into short lengths, then used a drill press to hollow the middle of each length. Finally, they filled the hollow spaces with cheese. And the name they gave to this new snack was “shotzels.”

The new snack was marketed in around the brothers’ home town of Battle Creek, Michigan. Eventually it caught the interest of snack and candy giant Mars, who gave the snack a classier name (and a more automated production process). And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Combos were born.

I confess that I find Combos addictive, and I’ll pick up a bag whenever I stop at a gas station during a road trip. They deliver a satisfying hard-pretzel crunch that gives way to a beer-cheese-like filling that’s calibrated perfectly to the bliss point. They’d be the perfect snack, except the fat and chemicals probably take a few years off your life.