These sweet, stacked snacks make a perfect little gift or sweet/salty finger food for your at-home holiday soiree.
Although later we recommend using gluten-free pretzels, it’s not a “tweak” made necessarily for reasons of overall healthiness. The jury is still out on exactly what is going on with the gluten/gluten free fiasco these days, but there are potential problems with both – not to sound TOO doom and gloom while we’re aiming for sparkly and bright.
But, as discussed in The New Yorker, one reason for the increasing digestive difficulty for people could be attributed to the amount of gluten (and specifically, “vital wheat gluten”) added into industrially made bread. It keeps increasing.
Not only that but traditional bread needs time to ferment, “for yeast and bacteria to activate the dough”. A process often being skipped these days.
The other side of this issue though is that gluten-free does NOT = carefree. Highly refined flours, sugar, and calories are often added to such foods to overcompensate for flavour and texture.
So. Good advice that works both for the holidays and for your gluten/gluten-free food ratios is moderation.
Tip: We used the widely-available Glutino gluten-free pretzels for this recipe.
Chocolate Pecan Pretzel bites: Ingredients
- Small(ish) pretzels
- Medjool dates pitted and quartered (or so)
- Dark chocolate, chopped into uniform little squares
- Whole pecans, lightly toasted if you like
Method
- Preheat oven to 300. Let it warm while you line a baking sheet with parchment paper and layout your pretzels. Top the pretzels with a little chunk of Medjool date then stack on a small square of dark chocolate. Next, pop your pretzels into the oven to bake for 5 minutes.
- Once your 5 minutes is up, your chocolate is melty and pretzels are nicely browned, remove from the oven and squish on your pecans. Squish enough to let the chocolate ooze prettily over the date and pretzel.
- Let your pretzel bites cool and even slide your tray into the fridge to let them harden faster. Package them up in a mason jar with a nice ribbon and drop them off at a loving doorstep near you!
Our version of chocolate pecan pretzel bites is tweaked from Hershey’s
