It’s Superbowl Sunday this weekend and Tory and I wanted to make some kind of snack or appetizer to share. Let’s be honest, we both will watch the game but the best part for us is the snacks and the food! This year we decided to get together over the Martin Luther King holiday when we both happen to have a day off work and make up some snacks recipes.
We settled on making pretzel sticks and creating our own snack mix – we’ll focus on the pretzels today and come back to the snack mix another time.
The idea for the pretzels came on Thanksgiving. Derek and I drove up to Alexandria to have Thanksgiving dinner with Nana, my parents, Auntie Sal and her husband Clayton. In true Whitten family tradition there were some snacks on the table for cocktail hour – not too many since this was Thanksgiving after all and there was going to be plenty of food! One of those snacks wasn’t homemade but was Snyder’s Honey Mustard and Onion pretzel sticks. The most surprising part about this story is that Derek liked them! He usually isn’t a fan of either pretzels or mustard so I was quite surprised. When we returned home we tried to find them in the store and couldn’t – we could find pretzel pieces but not the sticks. So since our local grocery stores (and I looked at every different chain I could) didn’t carry them these made the perfect target for a copy cat recipe!
We started with this recipe here as our base but ended up tweaking the seasoning a bit – especially the onion powder to bump up the onion flavor, after all they are honey mustard AND onion pretzel sticks we were trying to re-create. They turned out to be a winner – I’m not sure if I can say true copycat since we haven’t been able to find the Snyder’s version to compare against but we both liked them a lot!
Here’s what you need:
Start by measuring out into a bowl some honey, Dijon mustard, garlic powder, onion powder and dried mustard.
What do you think of that cutting board? Isn’t it cool! Tory gave it to me for Christmas – and she thinks I’m the nice sister! Maybe there is hope for her after all.
Next pour in some melted butter.
And whisk it all together.
Taste the sauce at this point to see what you think. This is when we knew we wanted more onion. Don’t be afraid if the flavor is strong as it’s going on pretzels which will mellow the flavor out, but you want to like the combination.
Next pour it over the pretzels in a zip top bag. We did this in two batches with half the sauce and half the pretzels each time so we had room to shake in a gallon bag. You could do it all at once if you have a big two gallon bag. Shake the bag until the pretzels are well coated with the sauce.
Next pour the pretzels out onto a foil lined baking sheet (you could use parchment too but all we had was tinfoil on this particular day). Bake at 250 degrees for 45 min to an hour, stirring every 10-15 minutes.
The finished product will look a little darker and you may be able to see some spots on the ends of the pretzels starting to brown. They also won’t be as shiny as when you put them in.
As they cool make sure to periodically stir them or mix them up with your hands. They will have a tendency to stick a little bit because of the honey if you don’t do this. Once they’ve completely cooled though they will stop sticking.
Now all that’s left is to serve them up.
Enjoy the game!
- ¼ c honey
- 3 T Dijon mustard
- ¼ t garlic powder
- 1 t onion powder
- ½ t dried mustard
- 2 T butter, melted
- 1 lb bag of pretzel sticks.
- Preheat oven to 250 degrees and line two baking sheets with foil or parchment.
- Melt butter and pour into a bowl with honey, Dijon, garlic and onion powders and dried mustard. Whisk until completely blended.
- Pour half of the sauce and half of the pretzels into a gallon zip top bag. Shake until the pretzels are well coated.
- Spread onto the prepared baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining sauce and pretzels and pour onto the second baking sheet.
- Bake for 45 min to an hour until the ends of the pretzels begin to brown. Stir every 10-15 minutes.
- Stir periodically as they cool to keep them from sticking.
- Store in a tightly covered container or zip top bag.
[…] recipe is long overdue to be posted. Tory and I concocted this when we got together to create our Honey Mustard Pretzel recipe which we posted at Superbowl time back in February. We are both self-professed carb lovers […]