How to Shape Pretzels

Pretzels are delicious and fun and easy to make, but I've always struggled with how to Shape Pretzel dough into that familiar pretzel shape.

Step 1

Firstly you should've your dough sectioned into portions, give it some gentle kneading and turn it into a ball shape.

Step 2

We now need to make this into a long sausage shape. The longer you make this, the easier this will be to shape and also the larger your pretzel will be. If you keep the center of the dough a little thicker you'll have that typical German style pretzel with the thick fluffy bread.

Step 3

Next, you need to make the end bits a bit longer so that you can bring the ends around like this. You may need to re-roll these ends until you can get the dough to stretch around.

Step 4

The next three steps can be done nice and quickly when you get the hang of it. We first want to cross over our end pieces.

Step 5

Then we want to twist the ends again, like in the image below.

Step 6

And finally, we lift the ends up to the top part of the pretzel. I add a little bit of water to the top part here to ensure that everything sticks together.

And there you have it, the pretzel shape. You can experiment with different approaches here too. if you keep the dough long and thing you can create some giant pretzels too.