Recreate the beer garden experience at home! Celebrate spring this weekend with friends, craft brews, and these homemade pretzel nuggets with a cajun mustard dip. Your backyard will be the place to party with this recipe!

One of my absolute favorite things to do on a lovely ~~spring~~ bizarrely-warm-February day is to sit at a picnic table at a local beer garden with friends, drinking brews and enjoying food truck grub. #heaven

Unfortunately, with three young lads, it’s tough to escape to a brewery when fab weather strikes. And if we do, it’s not long before someone needs a nap, someone pooped their pants, and someone goes missing. Kinda puts a damper on the whole chill beer garden vibe, if you ask me. So instead, I do my best to recreate my favorite things about it at home.

With wonderful weather in store for the next few weeks, you can bet my fridge is stocked with craft beers and even (dare I say it before Memorial Day?) Rosé! And now that I’ve mastered making pretzels at home? Well, let’s just say… backyard shindig at our place!

Making homemade pretzel nuggets at home can be as easy or complicated as you want it to be. The actual making of the dough is easy-peasy. It’s how type-A you get afterwards that determines the time investment. I started out thinking I’d want to spend time in the kitchen forming each pretzel to knot-perfection. In reality, I made three perfect pretzels then decided I’d rather be drinking beer on my patio. Truth.

Hey, pretzel nuggets taste just as awesome as pretzel knots but take so. much. less. time.

Homemade Pretzel Nuggets How-To

To get started, you’ll first make the dough by adding sugar and yeast to warm water in the bowl of a stand mixer. Let it sit five minutes or so, or until it gets foamy. Next, we’ll add the egg, 1 tablespoon of salt and flours and mix with a paddle hook and beat until the dough pulls away from the bowl.

Remove the dough, kneed it into a ball, then allow it to rest, in a greased and covered bowl in a warm spot for about an hour.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly grease two wire racks with cooking spray and place them on top of baking sheets. Bring 10 cups of water to a boil. Now, it’s time to cut and shape the dough. Roll the dough out into a rectangle, approximately 12 inches by 8 inches. Cut into 8 strips.

If you want to make pretzels, cut each of the 8 strips into four additional sections. Roll each section into a thin rope, and knot.

Otherwise, just cut all of the dough into nuggets. Once the water is boiling, add the baking soda. In batches, add the pretzels into the boiling water and cook for three minutes, flipping the dough occasionally.

Remove with a slotted spoon and place on the wire racks. Repeat with remaining dough.

Allow pretzels to dry approximately 10-15 minutes then brush them with the egg wash and sprinkle with remaining salt. Bake until tops are golden 8-10 minutes, rotating the pans from top to bottom half-way through.

Flip pretzels over and bake until the tops are golden, an additional 3-5 minutes.

Serve with cajun mustard and your fave beer! Yum!

And just to prove that it can be done…

Can’t even get a picture of it before the little hands get on ’em. Which is why… I just made nuggets. They don’t care and neither do I!