Breakfast at Bäckerei Frank (2014)
travelhungry.co
travelhungry.co
I jest, this was a succinctly nice post to read about something that I take for granted all my life. There is a certain warmth and familiarity to this post.
I love my bakeries around here and regularly prefer their breakfast over the hipster chia super ultra food life bowls with yoghurt and 2 nuts for 15€ around here.
Its also very tricky to get the bretzel to become perfect, you need a real baker oven that can bring the heat. Then you dunk it into the solution, you shoot it into the oven, and leave the oven door open for about 2 minutes of the baking time. This allows for the "mirror" finnish of the bretzel, you only get when they are properly baked.
Frozzen with the lye solution already on it, then unfrozzen, salten and baked, will always be dryed bad bretzels, unless you dunk them into the lye solution after unfreezing. The "shop" baked bretzen will always be inferior.
I really don’t like to complain but it is so crazy to me that when you go to southern Germany or Austria that good bakeries are just that much more common, whereas in large northern cities they have been evicted by large bakery chains or cheap bakeries which all get their bread delivered from the same factory in the morning.
One of the largest chains has the ingredients for their bread up on the web: https://malzers.de/produkte/brote
I don't think there's corn syrup in any of them; I checked a few rye breads and they had not added sugar of any kind.
Such a hyperbolic comment discredits itself instantly. Complaining about bread containing water is perhaps the most ludicrous - all bread contains a substantial amount of water, typically 50-85% of the amount of flour, with most bread around 65%.
Yes, there may be some poor quality bread out there, but it's not because it's "mostly corn syrup and water." A more reasonable complaint would be "I don't like this bread because it contains some corn syrup."
But they're not even popular in all of Germany! The "Weisswurstequator" - a rough dividing line north of which the white sausages just aren't a thing - also largely applies to soft pretzels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wei%C3%9Fwurst%C3%A4quator
Nutella also sounds like an abomination to me, though savoury toppings - butter, cold cuts, cheese - are OK. Though a fresh pretzel is such a treat you've usually eaten it before giving much thought to toppings.
As an American living in the US, I'll just say that my user name is a testament to what I do for a living.
They are popular enough all over Germany for them to be sold in virtually every bakery all over Germany. Weißwurst, on the other hand, is only available in specialty restaurants (though I assume it's sold in all large supermarkets). Having eaten both, it's not hard to understand why.
As a Bavarian living in Berlin, I am shocked both about the (lack of) quality and the (high) prices of pretzels.
The swabian brezel is cut before baking and therefore has a (bigger) "Ausbund" in the thicker section :)
It's also interesting that in the past the Brezn was made with lard in many bakeries.
But this time you do not cut the Bretzel, but break off the pieces at the break points. Start with the thin parts of the Bretzel.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obatzter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obatzda
The german version has an image with a Bretzel
Edit: just this morning, I was wondering if I could make pretzels at home.
conclusion: too much trouble for the size of oven I have. I'd probably eat them all inside of a day.
You can also "half bake" some of the brezels and deep-freeze them for later.
Just dunk it in the jar of nutella or whatever, trying to butter and then apply jam or nutella or whatever to something with a shape this complicated is a loser's game.
Pretty easy to slice a Brezn in half with the proper tooling.
I'm curious why lye is not more widely used outside of Europe; it really add an amazing flavor to baked goods.
Why is it that Europeans can't build themselves up without putting America down?
It speaks to a flaw in the character. A deep insecurity.
Also, thinking America is defined by manufactured products while Europe is defined by home-made products is deeply insulting to both European manufacture and American home-made industry. America has corner bakeries, Europe has Aldi and Tesco.
If you read the article more closely you might get the idea that the writer is an American expat wife...
She's from the US...
It's also a flaw in the character taking every criticism personal (your bread is shit so is your cheese...and your so called pizza would be a death sentence in italy) but, for example no one from Europe would argue that the US has the much richer BBQ and "FastFood"-Culture (partially thank to African-American's) and as a Swiss-person i think the US has the much better small-brewery (IPA etc) beer than whole Europe..yes also better then Belgium and UK.
Maybe first look a yourself ;)