Soft Pretzel Kit with Homemade Cheese Sauce

I'm not that into sports, but one reason I do like to go to various games is for the food. Roasted peanuts, popcorn, ice cream, jumbo hot dogs. But one of my all-time favorites is the soft pretzel. Soft, doughy interior with a crispy, buttery exterior, studded with large salt crystals. If only there was a way to make them at home... Enter the Soft Pretzel Kit.


The kit comes with a flour mixture and a packet of salt crystals, so all you have to do is add some water. The dough comes together with the help of some elbow grease.


Then you follow the handy little guide for shaping the dough into pretzels. A little melted butter slathered on top, a liberal sprinkling of the provided salt, and into the oven they go.




To celebrate my first soft pretzels, I decided to go the extra mile make a homemade cheese sauce:

Ingredients
2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tbsp flour
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk
1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
1 tsp mustard
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions
In a medium saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Mix in flour and salt. Stir constantly until the mixture starts to simmer. Slowly pour milk into the mixture. Continue stirring over medium heat until the mixture has thickened. Make sure there are no clumps. Stir in cheese and mustard and continue stirring until cheese is completely melted and the dip is smooth. Add salt and pepper to taste and serve dip warm.


The pretzels turned out great. Not perfectly like the ones at sports games, but they were still really good. And that cheese sauce was awesome. You could almost eat it like a soup, or even drink it because it was so wonderfully cheesy. You could probably decrease the milk content in the sauce if you want it more like the thick, bright yellow nacho cheese you see at convenience stores and wonder if that nuclear color ever exists in nature. All in all, I'll call this pretzel kit a twisted success.