Your Chocolate-Covered Pretzels Are Missing Something
There's a quick way to give everyone's favorite sweet-and-salty snack a flavor boost.
Peanut butter is the answer to almost any question I can fathom. What is the food I have eaten most in my life? Peanut butter. What would I eat every day on a desert island? Peanut butter. What's always in my pantry? Peanut butter. What makes most recipes better? Somewhere between a tablespoon and a cup of peanut butter.
What should you be adding to your chocolate dipped pretzels? Both peanut butter and butterscotch chips. These three ingredients are my own holy trinity of baking.
At any given moment, my freezer struggles to contain a plethora of takeout containers, each one stuffed to the brim with this very particular version of chocolate covered pretzels. This sweet and salty snacky dessert is stupidly easy to pluck from the freezer, pour into the cutest available bowl, and present to last-minute guests, who often respond with some form of, "Ope, better keep those away from me or I'll eat them all," their voices tinged with very convincing concern.
On its own, butterscotch is a flavor I often find too cloyingly sweet. (It's essentially just brown sugar and butter, after all.) But when they're melted down and dispersed across a dessert, butterscotch chips are a great way to lend a caramel note to your treat of choice without overpowering the other flavors. Peanut butter, meanwhile, brings a very-so-slightly savory silkiness to the chocolate, meaning that each pretzel gets fully enrobed in sweetness without getting gloppy.
Is this recipe going to change the world? No, only Dorie Greenspan can do that. But it's a fun activity that results in an easy and well-received edible hostess gift. Any recipe that brings more peanut butter into one's daily life is one worth sharing.
Chocolate Covered Pretzels 2.0
Makes about 75 pretzels
- 5 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips
- 5 oz. butterscotch chips
- 1/4 cup smooth peanut butter (use Jif or Skippy, not the natural stuff)
- Mini pretzel twists (roughly half a one-pound bag)
Heat the chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, and peanut butter together inthe microwave for approximately 40 seconds. Remove and stir with a rubber spatula, allowing everything to melt further and blend together. Continue heating in 15-second increments just until the last chunks of chip melt smooth. (Alternatively, you can melt these ingredients using a double boiler on the stove.)
Working quickly, toss a handful of pretzels into the chocolate mixture, pulling each one out with a pair of tongs and tapping the tongs against the side of the bowl to shake off any excess chocolate. Place the pretzel on wax paper to dry. Once the first handful of pretzels are complete, stir the chocolate mixture with a rubber spatula to keep it from setting. Repeat the dipping-and-stirring process until you run out of chocolate mixture.
Let the pretzels set for at least an hour, then test whether they're dry. If they are, they should lift cleanly off the wax paper, leaving no residue on the paper or your fingers. (If your kitchen is particularly warm, you might need to pop them in the fridge to fully set them.) Serve in a bowl, on a plate, or tie up into individual baggies or mason jars to hand out as party favors.
These pretzels can be kept at room temperature in a tightly sealed container for up to two weeks. Or, you can freeze them for up to a month and bring them up to temperature in the fridge just before serving.