Back when Rachel and I lived in Nashville (~2008-2013), I picked up baking as a hobby. Bagels and pretzels were my go to. I remember that I landed on a bagel recipe from the website Chow (now Chowhound). My favorite pretzel recipe came from what looked like a late-90s/early-aughts personal website. I remember it having a blue background and basic black text, a picture of a woman with a pretzel bigger than her face on it, and Oktoberfest as part of the site theme or URL.

During our trip to Europe this year (Bavaria, Dolomites) our son Karsten, always a lover of pretzels, really embraced the pretzel as a food-for-all-meals. He would eat them for breakfast (normal-ish in Bavaria), lunch, and dinner if available. He kept a pretzel journal, tallying his total (28) and ranking his favorites.

About a month after we returned, when we had some free time during the weekend, I decided I would try my hand at a batch of pretzels. I had not baked them in many years, but I knew that I had a trusted recipe. There was only one problem: I didn't know how to find the recipe.

I initially tried putting what I knew about the site and recipe into various LLMs to see if they had any knowledge of it they could find in their training data or web search capabilities. This was a complete failure.

Then I remembered the power of My Google Activity. I knew roughly when I had baked pretzels in the past, and had enough keywords to search on. Bingo! Up popped http://www.theoktoberfest.com/HTML/pretzel/ . There was just one problem: the site no longer existed.

Luckily we have the power of the Wayback Machine and Internet Archive. I dropped the URL in there, navigated back in time to find some captures, and was able to pull up an almost-perfect version of the pretzel recipe I remember. The image of the giant pretzel was no longer there, but the important information was.

And just like old times, I was able to make a decent batch of pretzles.

Although I can't claim this as my recipe - I'm going to document it here to add another source for people to stumble upon in the future, as well as a spot for me to re-reference without having to rely on an archived site.

Bavarian Pretzel Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 Package active dry yeast (2 tsp)
• Warm water (1/8 Cup-105°f/30ml-40°c)
• Warm water (1 1/3 Cup/315ml)
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 1 Tbs Brown sugar
• Flour (4 1/2 Cups/520 grams)
• Baking Soda (2 tbsp per cup of water used during the boil - quite a bit)

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Make sure you have two racks setup.

Put a pot/large saucepan on the stove. Add two tablespoons of baking soda for each cup of water added. Make sure that the put has at least 4 inches of water in it.

Dissolve yeast in 1/8-cup warm water and brown sugar. In practice, this means combining the water, yeast, and brown sugar in a small container. Stirring/breaking up clumps lightly is ok, but don't overdo it. Watch for activity from the yeast in the form of bubbles. This process usually takes ~5 minutes.

Stir in 1 1/3 cups warm water, add salt and flour. Knead dough until smooth and elastic. Dough does not need to rise at this point, although you can give it a few minutes if you like. I have done the kneading both by hand as well as using a dough hook on a stand mixer at low speed.

Cut or tear the dough into eight pieces. Roll each piece into a long thick pencil shape with your hands but keep the middle a little thicker. Pick up both ends, cross to form rabbit ears and then twist the ends and pull them back to the rest of the loop.

Place aside on lightly floured surface and let rise 10-20 minutes or so. You can tent with a cloth dampened with warm water if needed, but you will need to re-warm the cloth periodically. You will be looking for some visible rise but not a drastic amount.

While the dough rises, heat the water/baking soda mixture to a boil, then bring it down to a simmer.

Place pretzels one at a time in water/baking soda mixture for 10-15 seconds. I use a large mesh spoon - anything slotted should work. Push down with plastic utensil to ensure good coverage. Remove the pretzel from the bath (let drain a few seconds so you are not dripping) and place onto a pan lined with parchment paper. The pretzels should look like they've gotten larger and/or puffed up a bit during this process, and also seem a bit wrinkly.

Use a sharp knife and slit the fattest part of the pretzel lengthwise, adding additional small cuts if desired. Salt the top of pretzels with course ground sea salt/pretzel salt. Place cookie sheet with pretzels into the oven for 18-19 minutes or until pretzel is to desired darkness.

Take the pretzels out and let cool on the pan for a few minutes, then move to a wire rack to finish cooling.

These pretzels are best enjoyed warm out of the oven. They can also be frozen once completely cool, and then thawed at room temp + rewarmed in an oven. Note that if they are exposed to much moisture during the thaw process the salt may dissolve into the pretzel some.