Are Pretzels Keto? Why Regular Pretzels Don't Fit and What Does

How Many Carbs Are in Pretzels?

These figures come from USDA FoodData Central’s entries for hard pretzels, plain, salted, for whole-wheat hard pretzels and for soft pretzels. Net carbs are total carbohydrate minus fiber, worked out before rounding, so a row can be a tenth of a gram off if you subtract the rounded numbers yourself.

The one-ounce row is the one to remember: about 21.8 grams of net carbs. That isn’t a portion problem you can measure your way around. An ounce of raw pecans, by comparison, has about 1.2 grams of net carbs, which is why our pecan guide is about portions and this one isn’t.

A soft pretzel is a bigger version of the same problem. A medium one weighs about four ounces, and almost all of that is bread, so it lands at nearly 78 grams of net carbs before any dipping sauce.

What none of these figures can tell you is whether a handful “keeps you in ketosis.” That depends on everything else you eat in a day, not on one food, so use the table to see how much room pretzels take up rather than as a pass or fail.

Where the Carbs in Pretzels Come From

A pretzel is mostly wheat flour, and the carbohydrate is the flour’s starch. There isn’t a sugary coating to scrape off or a filling to leave behind. The plain hard pretzels in the table have only about 2 grams of sugar per 100 grams; nearly all the rest is starch.

That is also why whole-wheat pretzels don’t help much. They carry more than twice the fiber of the plain ones, but an ounce still has 23 grams of total carbohydrate, so the net carbs only drop by about a gram. The flour has changed, but it is still flour.

The chew comes from that flour too. Our garlic parmesan pretzel recipe puts it this way: the chew is gluten, which is exactly what a low-carb flour can’t give you. That is why a keto pretzel doesn’t just swap the wheat flour for almond flour one for one. Something else has to do the stretching.

Store-Bought “Low-Carb” Pretzels: What to Check on the Label

There are pretzels in the snack aisle sold as low-carb, keto or high-protein, and how much they differ from a regular bag depends entirely on what is in them. Their recipes and labels change, so rather than judge particular brands, here is what to look at on whichever bag you are holding.

• The serving size, in grams. A small number can come from a small serving. Compare the grams to the 28-gram ounce in the table above before comparing anything else.
• Total carbohydrate and dietary fiber. These are on the Nutrition Facts panel. Subtract the fiber from the total and you have the net carbs the panel itself supports.
• The net carb number on the front of the bag. That is the brand’s own subtraction. If it is lower than your total-minus-fiber figure, look for what else they took out, such as sugar alcohols, if the panel lists them.
• The first few ingredients. If wheat flour or a wheat starch leads the list, the bag is still a wheat pretzel, whatever the front says. A pretzel built on something else, such as nut flours or added fiber, will say so here.

Then compare the result to the table. A bag that comes in close to a regular pretzel per ounce is a regular pretzel with a different label.

How Keto Pretzels Are Different

A keto pretzel doesn’t try to make wheat dough with less wheat in it. It starts from fathead dough: shredded mozzarella and a little cream cheese melted together, with almond flour and an egg worked in while the cheese is still hot. The melted cheese does the job gluten does in a regular pretzel, stretching into a rope that holds a twist without tearing. The fathead dough guide covers how the dough works and how to fix it when it turns sticky or cracks, so we won’t repeat that here.

What you get is a soft pretzel, not a bag of crunchy ones. Our garlic parmesan recipe describes the result as closer to a garlic knot than to a hard-crusted pretzel, and at its best within minutes of leaving the oven. If what you are missing is the crunchy snack-bag kind, none of our recipes makes that.

They are also not carb-free. Almond flour has carbohydrate of its own, and so does anything that goes on top, so each recipe has its own Nutrition Facts panel, worked out per serving from that recipe’s ingredients. Use that rather than any single “keto pretzel” number.

Savory or Sweet: Our Keto Pretzel Recipes

All three of our pretzel recipes start from fathead dough. Where they part ways is what goes into the dough and what goes on top, and that is what the table compares.

The garlic parmesan pretzels are the place to start. They use the classic four ingredients, and the dough is shaped while it is still warm, which teaches you how fathead dough behaves faster than anything else. The pepperoni pizza pretzels go further in the same direction, with cheese rolled inside each one and pizza toppings on the outside, and they need the half-hour chill before shaping.

The cinnamon pretzels keep the dough itself plain and put all the sweetness in the coating. They are brushed and rolled in cinnamon and sweetener once they come out of the oven, while they are still warm enough for it to stick.