A fresh pretzel, shiny and warm from the oven, covered in melted, still bubbling cheese. Honestly? You can take your tasting menus, take your molecular gastronomy, take your small plates, and shove them, frankly. Because heaven, to paraphrase Belinda Carlise, is a place in Bolton.
What Angelika Searle doesn’t know about pretzels really isn’t worth knowing. She knows the history inside out - the Romans were involved, French monks somewhere along the line, before they were adopted and finessed by the Germans - but most importantly, she knows exactly how they’re supposed to taste.
That said, the confirmed ‘dumpling muncher’ (in the south of Germany you’re a dumpling muncher - a ‘knödelfresser’ - and in the north, you’re a fish head, a ‘fischkopf’) only started making them around four years ago.
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Perhaps playing up a little to the German stereotype, there was a stern pragmatism behind her decision to become a baker (though her maiden name is Dunkel, which means ‘spelt’, so there must be some baking somewhere in the ancestry). Before all this, she was an occupational therapist.
“It was a business decision,” she told me last week, on a visit to her bakery, a small, unlikely corner of Bavaria in Bolton, sandwiched between a ‘vehicle aesthetics’ specialist and a kitchen wholesaler. There are Bavarian flags and when you go through the door, cowbells clang together. “I am resourceful,” she says with a shrug. “I used the internet and I went on YouTube.”
So OK, while she wasn’t taught generations-old family recipes by a silver-haired grandmother in a chocolate box cottage in the Black Forest, there’s still some nostalgia to be found if you scratch away at the surface. It may have been a business decision, but it was also because the type of pretzels she wanted - the proper Bavarian ones she grew up eating from the bakeries in her hometown of Augsberg - simply weren’t available here.
In Germany, you might well make 20 different types of biscuits at Christmas at home. But pretzels you buy from the bakery, the reason for which we’ll come to shortly.
“I started with Christmas biscuits, then a fruit bread, a typical Alpine bread, then stollen, then lebkuchen, all produced from home,” she says. Her fruit bread won a Great Taste award, and soon she was selling her Bavarian wares at artisan markets, events like the Bolton Food Festival and Christmas markets all over the North West. It was when Christmas was over that Angelika saw a pretzel-shaped gap in the market, and her bakery Pretzel & Spelt was established proper.
There is a reason why hers are the real deal. And it’s perhaps not for the faint hearted. One of the keys to a proper pretzel - in fact, it’s not a proper pretzel without it - is strong alkali. Caustic soda, in fact. Which, of course, in the wrong hands and the wrong proportions, is a smidge deadly.
“You don’t faff around with making pretzels in Germany,” she says. “Because you have this alkali, this caustic soda that you have to use, and they’re so widely available, you just don’t do them as home baking.”
The diluted soda, just three or four percent, is used as a catalyst, reacting with the amino acids in the bread, meaning they brown faster. It also creates the trademark sheen on the top, and once baked, the ‘pretzel lye’ is completely neutralised, and has the added bonus of leaving salt behind on the surface too, in a wonderful perk of science. Don’t necessarily try this at home, perhaps, but then with these on the doorstep, why would you?
Of course, not long after she’d started in the baking business, the pandemic came along, bringing with it some unforeseen challenges, but also opportunities. And that Germanic pragmatism also kicked into gear. When the supermarkets ran out of flour, Angelika was able to access giant sacks of it easily. So while schools were shuttered, she enlisted help from local pupils at her kid’s school to help package flour into smaller amounts for people to come and buy.
“People came in hordes,” she said. “I had three teenagers packing flour. It got in the newspaper that ‘we sell flour!’, so suddenly I had to have a workforce.”
She shifted nearly eight tonnes of flour in three months. Once the word got out on social media, queues an hour long were soon snaking out of the door. There wasn’t a lot to do at the time, and her bakery was considered an essential business.
Of course, everyone bought a pretzel while they were at it, and soon enough word of mouth meant she had a whole legion of new customers for her sourdough loaves, cakes and biscuits. She also does a mean Black Forest gateaux in a most welcome blast from the 80s.
So she weathered the pandemic and now here we are, a handful of years after she began baking, in the run-up to Oktoberfest, a festival which, like Halloween, has been adopted enthusiastically by the British, despite it having nothing at all to do with us. The beer drinking aspect helps, of course.
During this busy time, she makes about 1500 pretzels a week, providing them to dozens of Oktoberfest celebrations the length and breadth of the north. “I’m also amazed at how authentic they are too,” she says. “Every year new customers find us. I’m also amazed at how many oompah bands there are out there now!”
As well as those with a penchant for swinging steins and standing on tables, she also makes her pretzels for hotels and restaurants around the country. The Corinthia Hotel serves them for breakfast in Whitehall. Indian street food heroes Bundobust currently have a version with turmeric and garam masala on their special Gujarat-meets-Munich Oktoberfest menu.
She says there are a couple of bakeries making them the right way in London, but their overheads mean that they’re far more expensive, which is why places in London order from her instead. She makes them for Albert’s Schloss’s sister bar Albert’s Schenke in Liverpool. Albert’s Schloss, which has its own bakery, makes its own, which she clearly disapproves of, bluntly denouncing them as ‘horrible’.
To be fair, she has set the bar perilously high for all others even attempting such things. Angelika’s pretzels come with a host of magical things on them. Bacon and cheese, tomato and mozzarella, salami, mushrooms, ham, vegan cheese and spinach, even a chilli con carne.
She also makes filled pretzel-style morning rolls, strudels and German biscuits of all kinds. You can get a bowl of warming soup and a pretzel for just over two quid at lunch time. Anyone would be lucky to have this on their doorstep. Not bad for a knödelfresser.
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