![]() My favorite place to buy pretzels is outside the sports complexes on game day. When people ask what the difference is you give them a New York vendor pretzel that tastes like a piece of cardboard!” Another friend wrote, “They’re the perfect balance of salty on the outside and a tiny bit sweet inside with the just tough enough crusty exterior that has an inexplicable sheen.” For Glickman, the superiority of a Philly soft pretzel is so simple as to be self-evident: “ taste really, really good.” “It’s like trying to explain why Wawa is great” - another inalienable truth your 7-Eleven has nothing on our convenience stores - “You don’t realize how good they are until you leave Pennsylvania. “People really do not get how much better they are,” one Philadelphia native wrote on Facebook when I asked Philly friends to explain what makes our soft pretzels so good. Though pretzels as a delicacy have been around since 610 AD, the best soft pretzel wasn’t made until Federal Baking Company in South Philadelphia opened. Since renamed Federal Pretzel Baking Company, the business was the first to develop the figure-eight shape, as a means to streamline the baking process. The figure-eight is alleged to have come from the Federal Baking Company in South Philadelphia, which was opened by Italian immigrants in the 1920s. ‘I’ve only eaten a vendor pretzel in NYC once, and it was a terrible mistake’įor the uninitiated, one can recognize a Philly pretzel immediately by its shape. While bakeries in Philly have been slinging pretzels for more than a hundred years, Philly Soft Pretzel Factory will be the first to take a stab at convincing persnickety and particular New Yorkers to ditch their doughy, heat-lamp disappointments for our hot-out-the-oven classics. This year, Philly Pretzel Factory is celebrating its 20th year of business - it’s now franchised in 172 locations nationwide, with one franchise in Staten Island and another on Long Island. Glickman and his partners at Gotham Foods, LLC are the ones responsible for bringing the two Philly Pretzel Factories to New York City. “Once you taste it, you know right away why it’s different,” Philly Pretzel Factory franchisee Jason Glickman told me by phone. As one friend put it, “I’ve only eaten a vendor pretzel in New York City once, and it was a terrible mistake I will never make again.” Invariably, on the bus back to New York on visits home, I smuggle a few pretzels with me, only to find I can’t make it the two-and-a-half hour ride without finishing my limited rations. Friends and I would pick them up during free period in high school they’d be pre- or post- ball game inexpensive delicacies they’re as omnipresent at my family’s holiday parties as sports commentary and fresh babies. Those figure-eight pretzels Photo via Philly Pretzel FactoryĪs a Philadelphia native and dedicated carb-head, Philly soft pretzels have always been a part of my snack regimen (because despite how filling they are, a pretzel is always a small snack). Oh, you thought New York was the food capital of America? You were wrong - until now. You have eaten brown dough.īut soon, there may be a renaissance of better pretzel eating in New York: Two locations of Philly Pretzel Factory are opening in Manhattan this year, in Harlem and Tribeca, and the company, which serves pretzels far superior to any to have graced New Yorkers’ lips, plans to franchise close to two dozen more outposts in New York after that. If your pretzel is knot-shaped, has been microwaved, and is barely salted (or worse, bald), you have never eaten a pretzel. No one should ever be forced to eat the burnt, dry excuses for pretzels available at ballparks, movie theaters, and street vendors in New York. ![]() A true soft pretzel should be nothing but a Philly soft pretzel, the doughy-yet-crusty, somehow both salt-encrusted and wet, pull-apart figure-eight. Philly soft pretzels are one of those foods that are either completely misunderstood or shamefully unknown by the rest of the country. For people from Philadelphia, life holds a few inalienable truths: the Eagles are the greatest football team in the history of professional sports a parade of drunk old men in satin costumes and dainty umbrellas is a family affair that thing is a jawn that water is wooder and there is no such thing as a pretzel if it isn’t shaped like a figure eight.
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