The pretzel breakdown

(This is Bringing the Heat, an as-often-as-I-feel-like-it feature where I say something that will probably get me yelled at on Twitter.)

People took great issue with my take on Thursday that we suck at salty snacks. This despite the fact that we suck at salty snacks. Popcorn is an awful food. Kettle chips are miserable. Potato chips are fine in limited quantities, except nobody has ever eaten them in limited quantities. Nuts are … look, I don’t like nuts. You probably do. I will not come out and say you’re wrong for liking them, but I would ask about your textural choices, because nuts are (to me) fairly unpleasant. But that’s okay.

There is one more notable salty snack, though, that I have not addressed here. Pretzels.

Pretzels are the highest-variant salty snack we have, because they have the most variety in forms. Are we talking soft pretzels you get at the mall? Are we talking giant Snyder’s things that are made of reconstituted sawdust? Are we talking little sticks that make the best little Wolverine claws or walrus tusks? You can’t issue an overall statement on the quality of pretzels because each type is so wildly different.

So let’s go pretzel-by-pretzel:

Big, hard pretzels

These are the big ones made famous by Snyder’s, though they are hardly alone in manufacturing them. And, as I hinted at above, if you told me Snyder’s was also a lumber company, and the pretzels are reconstituted sawdust sprinkled with a modest helping of salt. I don’t understand their existence. They are difficult to eat, and then once you do break them, they crumble into dust, half in your mouth and half falling to the floor. The only thing I can figure these are for is people who smoke cigars and want something else to replace the nicotine.

Grade: D-

Pretzel nuggets

Nowadays you can get pretzels nuggets filled with any number of things, like upscale Combos. Peanut butter is the most common one. And these should be delicious — creamy, delicious peanut butter inside a salty shell—but by and large they miss the mark. I don’t know if it is the preservatives they have to use to make the peanut butter stay edible inside the pretzel, but the filling always ends up chalky and disappointing. If I didn’t know what I was about to eat, I’d probably give these a C+, B-, but the fact that I go in expecting deliciousness and end up disappointed means pretzel nuggets have to be downgraded.

Grade: C-

Pretzel sticks/mini-pretzels

There are any number of forms of tiny pretzels to consider here, but by and large they all taste the same, and I’m not interested in breaking down forms (though the checkerboard/grid form is the worst of the group). These are good! They can be monotonous, and any time they are in some kind of trail mix situation they end up absorbing other, worse flavors, but by themselves I can eat a bajillion of them, only stopping when my body loses every last bit of moisture to all the salt.

Grade: B+

Soft pretzels

Soft pretzels are the food of the gods. Salt, cinnamon sugar, garlic, parmesan, I don’t care. I don’t have the power in me to go to the mall and not get a big soft pretzel or a bunch of little soft pretzel nuggets. They are delicious, and if you disagree with that I can only conclude that you are a crazy person whose opinion is not to be trusted.

The only caveat: Freshness. I don’t get soft pretzels at, for example, a ball game, because those were made in mass quantities in 1974 and they’re still selling them off, and those are disgusting, no matter how much salt and nacho cheese (please no mustard) you add to them. But the fresh ones? Oh my god, open the malls right now, because I need to go to there.

Grade: A++++