Urban Roots, Sacramento, CA

I love smoke.

I love smoked meats.

I love smoked Scotch.

I love the smell of a campfire. While I felt sorry for the people who lost their homes in the Caldor fire in 2021, I enjoyed the nonstop smokiness that permeated the county for several weeks straight.

I love to have smoke in a box; I love to have it with a fox.

I mean, smoke is my Kryptonite. Or maybe it’s the opposite of Kryptonite; I’m never really sure how to frame this. My point is that if you add smoke to something I immediately want to consume it. A few years back my wife bought me a device that pumps wood smoke into your drink. The inventor of this device really deserves a Nobel prize.

And so I was intrigued when Loyal Reader Peter D. suggested I get a pretzel at Urban Roots in Sacramento. He had done the research and learned that the pretzel is smoked in a smoker.

Urban Roots is an independent brewery and smokehouse in downtown Sacramento. They smoke their own meats, and thus their menu is larded (literally) with mouth-watering sausages, pulled pork, ribs, and the like. Among their offerings is a Bavarian pretzel that itself spends some time in the smoker. This is an inspired feature that really sets their pretzel apart from others. They start with what appears to be a regulation Bavarian pretzel, brush it with butter, and then consign it to the smoker for awhile. The result is a flavorful pretzel with a rich, smoky flavor, chewy consistency, and an intoxicating aroma.

The pretzel is served on a small metal dish and that also includes a plastic container of beer cheese (as well as some brown mustard–but you’d be better off telling them to skip the mustard and double the beer cheese. That’s not because the cheese sauce is so great. It’s actually a little bland, and has the consistency of Hellmann’s mayonaise. And yet you find yourself dipping every bite of pretzel in it, the same way you find that you finished that bag of Andy Capp’s Hot Fries.)

But back to the pretzel, which is seriously good. The skin of the pretzel has a toasty consistency, which lends a crunchy snap to each new bite. Then, they’ve sprinkled it with just the right amount of coarse salt, that sticks to the buttery goodness on the skin. Oh, and it retains its chewy/crunchy texture long after it’s delivered to your table. This appears to be a fresh-baked pretzel, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they make them from scratch. My only critique is that it’s a bit small, and thus I can’t say it’s a meal in itself. But if you pair it with a few malty beers, as I did, you should be good.

The beer cheese, while definitely serviceable, isn’t quite up to the standard of the pretzel. It lacks the beery backbone that I’ve come to expect from a good beer cheese. And as noted above, it’s a little too creamy for my taste. Indeed, I suspect that some queso might have even outshone their beer cheese.

Total score: 4 stars. Totally worth getting this dish, but the beer cheese prevents it from entering amazing territory,

PRETZEL TRIVIA

Check out this grave marker:

Pretzel Pete was the name the good citizens of the Philadelphia gave to a mysterious stranger that showed up in 1962 and sold pretzels from a cart on Ridge Avenue. He didn’t speak much English, and occasionally got into angry arguments with invisible people in a language that no one understood. He didn’t have a home, and lived in a tent pitched in someone’s backyard, or sometimes in a shed or garage. But every morning he somehow was there at his spot on Ridge Avenue, selling his pretzels.

Such was his life in Philadelphia’s Roxborough neighborhood for some three decades. At some point some juvenile delinquents vandalized his pretzel cart, so he spent his last years selling pretzels out of a shopping cart. (There’s a special place in Hell for those juvies.)

At some point a Russian-speaking priest from the local Orthodox church tried to offer help to Pretzel Pete, but the latter responded angrily. Turns out Pete didn’t much like Russians, but after the priest calmed him down a bit, Pete told his story.

Pretzel Pete was an Albanian, born Choban Hoxha in 1913. During the Second World War he was captured by the Germans and sent to a prison camp. At the end of the war he was captured by the Russians and sent to a labor camp. He eventually escaped, and made his way to America. He arrived here in 1962, and spent the rest of his life selling pretzels. When he died in 1995, the local funeral home paid for his burial, and local townspeople collected funds for his headstone.

I tell you, if I had been in charge of ABC records when Steely Dan released Pretzel Logic in 1973, Pretzel Pete would have been on the cover.