Heike Meyer readies her pretzels for baking in a German-made oven Sept. 30. The owner of Brot Bakehouse School and Kitchen in Fairfax, Meyer is a professionally-trained baker from northern Germany.
Freshly-baked pretzels and pretzel buns in the Bavarian and Swabian tradition cool in the Brot kitchen. Meyer baked about 100 pretzels on Friday to be served at an authentic Oktoberfest dinner.
Heike Meyer's Stollen, made in the Dresden tradition, is a holiday bread with raisins and almonds.
Heike Meyer dips her pretzels in lye before baking. Lye, also known as sodium hydroxide, gives pretzels their shiny, mahogany color.
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Heike Meyer readies her pretzels for baking in a German-made oven Sept. 30. The owner of Brot Bakehouse School and Kitchen in Fairfax, Meyer is a professionally-trained baker from northern Germany.
FAIRFAX — Each year, Heike Meyer devotes the first weekend of October to pretzel making.
At Brot Bakehouse, the school and kitchen she started in Fairfax in 2008, Meyer bakes more than 100 pretzels for a special Oktoberfest dinner in Burlington and her neighbors.
“It’s very much fun because it's sort of like the start of the fall,” she said, standing in her kitchen sipping a strong cappuccino.
Born in Berlin and raised in northern Germany, Meyer knows how to twist her dough into just the right shape before placing the pretzels on sheets lined with parchment paper. They rest in the barn refrigerator before baking in her German-made oven for 10-12 minutes or when they turn perfectly brown in color.
“When we lived in New York, I bought [a pretzel] in Central Park, from one of the vendors, and it was so terrible. I couldn't eat it,” she said on Friday.
Hair pulled away from her face with a yellow kerchief, Meyer leaned against her butcher block island, set with a wedge of good cheese, a pitcher of lemon water, butter in a ceramic dish and fresh flowers. A batch of pretzels cooled on a baking rack.
“I'm usually not very particular about recipes, but pretzels are a bit of an exception because they can be butchered in such a way that they're not really resembling anything of the original. I’m trying to preserve the original recipes that came from Europe,” she said.
Freshly-baked pretzels and pretzel buns in the Bavarian and Swabian tradition cool in the Brot kitchen. Meyer baked about 100 pretzels on Friday to be served at an authentic Oktoberfest dinner.
Meyer learned the craft of baking at Weichard Brot, Berlin's oldest biodynamic bakery, and at the German National Baking Academy in Weinheim.
She’s traveled extensively, curating her love of all things bread with some of the best bakers in the world, like Nicolas Supiot at Les jardins de Siloé in France, Chad Robertson at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco and Jeffrey Hamelman at King Arthur Baking in Vermont.
After a five-year stint in New York City, Meyer and her husband, Jens, bought land off of Meade Road in Fairfax. Complete with a barn, a ridgeline view and a main stonehouse with a post-and-beam addition perfect for a professional kitchen, the couple was sold on the property’s charms.
“We liked the feeling of living in Vermont,” Meyer said. “I don’t know what it was, but it was something different.”
After a few years of juggling classes and production baking for retail stores, Meyer decided to focus solely on teaching, a skill that she said came to her naturally.
“I get very excited about breads and baking and especially about sourdough,” she said.
Brot Bakehouse offers educational workshops most weekends May through December. The most popular class is Sourdough 101, which walks amateur bakers through the care, keeping and baking of a sourdough culture.
Class sizes are small, with less than a dozen students gathered around the butcher block island for hands-on learning. Online registration fills up fast.
Meyer also opens the kitchen up for private lessons for friends and family, reunions or corporate bonding activities. This week, a German language class from Milton High School will visit for a class taught partly in German.
In the winter, Brot’s classes move online as a COVID-19 precaution. Meyer will be joined virtually on several lessons this year by guest instructors, like German pastry chef Thomas Jung and King Arthur’s Jeffrey Hamelman.
Heike Meyer's Stollen, made in the Dresden tradition, is a holiday bread with raisins and almonds.
Pretzels aren’t the only German specialty in her repertoire. Meyer is also well-known for her Dresden-style Stollen, a bread made with raisins and almonds. Plätzchen, delicate German Christmas cookies like zimtsterne, vanille kipferl, linzers and rumkugels are also part of her holiday class offerings.
On some summer and fall weekends, Meyer’s whole-grain breads can be found at Hudak Farms in Swanton and on the menu at Misery Loves Co. in Winooski. A selection of her sourdough pastries are available at Onyx Tonics Specialty Coffee in Burlington.
Pretzels are on the menu in Vermont at more than one craft brewery’s taproom. Sprinkled with salt and served in a basket with mustard or a “beer cheese,” they’re an appetizer that pairs well with a saison and the summer sun.
But in Germany, pretzels are not a snack food. They’re taken seriously, Meyer said, and served as part of a meal alongside sausage and sauerkraut, pickles and other condiments.
Pretzels are especially popular in Bavaria and Swabia, two regions in southern Germany where they are available all year.
“They are a normal part of your daily diet,” Meyer said. “People sometimes eat two or three pretzels per day, in the morning, at lunch, in the evenings.”
Heike Meyer dips her pretzels in lye before baking. Lye, also known as sodium hydroxide, gives pretzels their shiny, mahogany color.
Made of sourdough and spelt, Meyer’s pretzels have a nuttiness and heartiness that is true to the Swabian tradition. Bavarian pretzels are typically made of wheat.
The two regions also shape their pretzels differently. Swabian pretzels are made the same thickness all the way around, while Bavarian pretzels are thick at the top and thinner at the arms, or the place where the dough twists in on itself.
To make pretzels in the Bavarian style, Meyer also lightly scores the dough so it pops open, revealing its softer interior.
German pretzels are also traditionally dipped in a lye solution, known as sodium hydroxide, which must be handled carefully. Irritating and corrosive, the solution becomes safe to eat after baking, when it neutralizes with heat and gives pretzels a crisp outer crust and their shiny, russet color.
“I’m trying to preserve the original recipes that came from Europe.”
–Heike Meyer, owner and instructor at Brot Bakehouse
Wearing an apron and her glasses, Meyer dunked a batch two at a time into a lye bath, before placing them in the oven. Ten short minutes later, the timer was beeping.
“I’m looking for a bit more color, like this one here,” she said, pointing to a pretzel the color of burnished mahogany.
The tray went back in for a minute more, their smell a tease.
“There we go,” she said, pulling the hot pretzels away from the parchment paper and onto sharing plates. “They are really good when you just have some cheese on them or a little bit of pickle.”
Bridget Higdon is the Messenger's Managing Editor. She was previously a staff writer and before that the editor-in-chief of The Vermont Cynic, UVM's independent newspaper. She loves to explore Vermont by bike and do the snow dance.
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