Pretzel bites — made with pizza dough
Soft pretzel bites are pizza dough with a chemistry trick: roll it, bathe it in baking soda, and the crust bakes mahogany-brown with that unmistakable pretzel tang. Pop-able, salty, and gone in one sitting.
Tell the page how many bites and it weighs the dough for the batch — the calculator's math. The baking-soda bath is the part you can't skip.
How much dough
For 30 bites, on New York dough — 15 g of dough a bite:
| Ingredient | Baker's % | For 30 bites |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | 265 g |
| Water | 63% | 167 g |
| Salt | 2.5% | 6.6 g |
| Olive oil | 2.5% | 6.6 g |
| Sugar | 1.5% | 4 g |
| Yeast | 0.23% | 0.6 g |
Making more or fewer? The dough scales straight off the count:
| Bites | Total dough | Flour |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | 225 g | 133 g |
| 30 | 450 g | 265 g |
| 45 | 675 g | 398 g |
| 60 | 900 g | 530 g |
The yeast is weighed for an example 8 h rise at 21 °C — set your real schedule in the calculator and it reweighs the pinch.
What else you’ll need
Beyond the dough — for 30 bites:
- 60 g baking soda, for the bath
- 1.5 L water, for the bath
- 1 egg, beaten, for the wash
- coarse pretzel or sea salt
- 30 g butter, melted, to finish
How it’s done
- Make the dough: 30 × 15 g pieces of New York dough — 265 g flour, 167 g water, 6.6 g salt and the yeast, weighed by the calculator for your schedule. (Leftover pizza dough works too.)
- Cut the dough into 15 g pieces and roll each into a small ball or short log.
- Bring the water to a boil and stir in the baking soda — stand back, it foams up.
- Boil the bites in batches for about 30 seconds, then lift out and drain. This bath is what makes them taste like a pretzel.
- Set on a lined tray, brush with egg wash, and scatter with coarse salt.
- Bake at 230 °C / 450 °F for 11–14 minutes, until deep mahogany; brush with melted butter while hot.
Questions from the counter
Why the baking-soda bath?
The alkaline bath is what gives a pretzel its brown, chewy, tangy crust — skip it and you've baked plain dough balls. It's the one step that turns pizza dough into a pretzel.
Lye or baking soda?
Traditional pretzels use food-grade lye, which is stronger but caustic to handle. Baking soda is the safe home version; baking it dry on a tray at 120 °C for an hour first makes it noticeably more pretzel-like.
Can I really use pizza dough?
Yes — a New York-style dough, with its touch of oil and sugar, is close to pretzel dough already, which is why the batch is weighed on that base.
Get the dough
The New York preset weighs the batch and writes the schedule — mix, rise, shape, bake. Pretzel bites is what you do with it.
The clock is a suggestion. The dough is the boss. In bocca al lupo!
Impasto is a free pizza dough calculator for Neapolitan, New York, Roman, Sicilian, Detroit, thin crust and focaccia doughs — flour, water, salt and yeast weighed in baker's percentages, with the fermentation schedule written for you.