Pretzels attempt 1

Pretzels... normally I would not aspire to create such things, as I have no sentimental attachment to these contorted ropes of salted bread. But my wife does, so I'm game. I'm following the Good Eats pretzel recipe. The dough is simple enough. I heard on Good Eats that hand-kneading takes twice as long as machine-kneading. So I kneaded this dough for 10 minutes by hand.

I set the dough to rise while I headed out to go shopping. However, a minor setback during which we temporarily lost $75 worth of coupons and gift cards for the store delayed us by 30 minutes. Since there was no way I'd return by the time the dough was done, I put it in the fridge to slow the rise.

I returned 1.5 hours later, and put the dough on the counter. I got it at least to room temperature (about 30 minutes), but couldn't wait any longer so I continued the recipe. The only problem was that since the dough wasn't finished rising, the dough started rising when I rolled it out into long ropes. The increased surface area of the rope combined with the heat of my hands probably helped this to happen. When I came back to a rope to try to roll it longer, I found it with a nearly hollow long air pocket in the middle. Thus I couldn't quite get the dough ropes long and thin enough, resulting in fat pretzels.

For salt, I used coarse sea salt that I crushed into smaller grains with my mortar and pestle. It worked fine. The pretzels had a nice moist and chewy texture out of the oven. The next day, I stored one in a plastic bag and ate it for lunch. By lunch time it was much tougher and the outside was slightly wrinkled. Maybe because of the plastic bag? Next time I will try to properly rise the pretzels. Below is a picture of the texture: