Thanks for sharing your pretzel experiences! CW INFO DUMP: The best pretzels in America are made by Pennsylvania Dutch peeps (unique pretzels being one of them). They’re not Dutch but Germans - back in the 1700s English people asked them who they were and they said Deitsch and so the English people were like “Dutch, ok” and didn’t suss that out farther. PA Dutch were poor and very insular until the early 1900s (poor continued long past then) due to their rural farming roots, which may be why they got into hard pretzels versus selling soft pretzels. They created an offshoot German language based on Palatine German from the 1700s during their ~200 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch_language PA Dutch is essentially dead in native speakers with only religious fanatics (in this case people who refuse to utilize modern technology - called Amish or Mennonites here) continuing to speak it. The main population stopped teaching their kids so they would sound more inclusive with the local English dialect and not have a PA Dutch accent due to learning PA Dutch first in the home. This push was began during the 1950s “white homogeny” period - though avoiding Nazi connotation following WWII probably had a hand in it as well. Anyway while the language is dead in non-insular-religious-fanatic communities, the food culture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple is still there and so we get the best hard pretzels there can be - but (prob due to the centuries-long socio-economic status of the peoples) they are not big on soft pretzels😞
These are the only hard pretzels I know:
Hard pretzels aren’t a big thing here because you can get the real thing:
Truly the promised land🥵
Thanks for sharing your pretzel experiences! CW INFO DUMP: The best pretzels in America are made by Pennsylvania Dutch peeps (unique pretzels being one of them). They’re not Dutch but Germans - back in the 1700s English people asked them who they were and they said Deitsch and so the English people were like “Dutch, ok” and didn’t suss that out farther. PA Dutch were poor and very insular until the early 1900s (poor continued long past then) due to their rural farming roots, which may be why they got into hard pretzels versus selling soft pretzels. They created an offshoot German language based on Palatine German from the 1700s during their ~200 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch_language PA Dutch is essentially dead in native speakers with only religious fanatics (in this case people who refuse to utilize modern technology - called Amish or Mennonites here) continuing to speak it. The main population stopped teaching their kids so they would sound more inclusive with the local English dialect and not have a PA Dutch accent due to learning PA Dutch first in the home. This push was began during the 1950s “white homogeny” period - though avoiding Nazi connotation following WWII probably had a hand in it as well. Anyway while the language is dead in non-insular-religious-fanatic communities, the food culture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapple is still there and so we get the best hard pretzels there can be - but (prob due to the centuries-long socio-economic status of the peoples) they are not big on soft pretzels😞
tldr