Soft pretzels add a taste of Germany

A taste of Germany is coming to the menu at The Daily Cafe.

Danielle Hook and Alazae Davis won the Te Puke High School Master Chef competition last week with a platter of soft pretzels, with their ideas to be adapted to become a menu item. They created three options — ham and cheese, Nutella and cinnamon sugar.

Danielle says winning was a little unexpected because of the amazing ideas of the other teams.

“Hopefully our idea will bring another cultural aspect to The Daily,” she says.

When the process began, German exchange student Sabrina Dempert was part of the team. She returned home in June.

“What we thought about is pretzels are something you often see on films and TV programmes, but it’s not that common around New Zealand to have a soft pretzel in a cafe.

“I can’t remember exactly how it came up, but I said to her ‘what type of pastries do you have?’ and she went through a list of things.

The team decided pretzels would be quite interesting.

“And there’s so much you can do with them,” she says.

While they had practised around a dozen times, there was still a slight problem with the dough rising on competition day.

“Every second lesson we would go into the kitchen and do a trial of different flavours and different ways of doing it.”

Danielle came up with the idea of using Nutella and also the method of getting it into the pretzel.

“I came up with the idea of how to roll the Nutella through the middle so when you took a bite, rather than get a lump of Nutella, you get it all the way through.’

Alazae wanted a pizza influence pretzel and that ultimately morphed into the ham and cheese combination.

Alazae says the basic recipe they used was one Sabrina translated from German for them.

“I reckon it will go down pretty good — we costed it out and it’s pretty cheap to make. It also brought in a different culture and people like to try new things.”

They say they are looking forward to working with The Daily to get the pretzels on to the menu.