Pretzel Mania

On a perfect sunny day over a holiday weekend, my husband and I pulled into Lititz, Pennsylvania for a visit to a very special and historic place. Lititz, Pennsylvania is the site of the very first commercial pretzel bakery in the US. Yes, its true, we visited a 150 year old pretzel bakery on our summer vacation.

While their actual beginnings are still somewhat shrouded in mystery, it is believed that pretzels first appeared in around 600 AD when Italian monks started handing the twisted baked good out to their students. The shape of the pretzel is steeped in symbolism. The crossed dough is said to resembled the way children were taught to pray, with their arms crossed over their chest. The knot itself is symbolic of the union of the parents and it is where the term "tying the knot" originated. The three holes formed by shaping the pretzel symbolize the holy trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. During the 7th century, the Catholic church tightened its rules on fasting and abstinence during Lent and people began eating a lot more of pretzels. Soon the pretzel spread to other parts of Europe and became a popular food item among many different cultures,  The pretzel is associated with good luck, long life and prosperity and was often given to the poor as a symbol of spiritual sustenance.

When German immigrants arrived in America and settled in Pennsylvania, they came with pretzels in hand and the Keystone state quickly became the epicenter of the American pretzel empire. This is where one Julius Sturgis enters the picture. He was a young man of German heritage living in Lititz, PA and he got a job at a small pretzel bakery in town. He worked ten hours a day in the blasting heat baking pretzels and it was also his job to clean out all the remaining pretzel detritus from the ovens at the end of the day. Well, he was tired after a long day of baking and sometimes he would just forget to clean out the ovens. The next morning, his boss would find old, hard burned pretzels in the ovens and would throw them away. One day Julius tasted one of these hard pretzels and he liked it. Eureka! The hard pretzel was born. He tried to convince his boss that the hard pretzels were delicious, that people would love them and that they'd make a ton of money if they started selling the hard pretzels as well as the soft ones. His boss was having none of that. So Julius saved his money and in 1861 he opened his own pretzel bakery right down the street and started making hard pretzels as well as soft. That Julius was trouble, trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for pretzel. Guess who is still making pretzels today?

The original Julius Sturgis pretzel bakery is now a museum and we took a tour and got schooled on pretzel making. For about 80 years, all the Sturgis pretzels were made in three ovens in this location in Lititz. The dough recipe calls for spring and winter flour, barley malt, yeast, water, canola oil and a little bit of the sour dough from the previous batch. Originally, the signature course salt was used not only for flavor, but also to keep the dough from sticking to the peel and the bottom of the oven. The ovens were stoked with wood beginning at about 2:00 am and pretzels would be made by hand and baked until about noon. The soft pretzels would come out of the oven and be sold that day, but the hard pretzels would be transferred to the second floor of the brick building, which was so hot that the pretzels would bake a second time just from the residual heat of the ovens downstairs.

In 1935, a machine was invented that could twist about 250 pretzels per minute rather than the 40 or so done by hand. In the 1940's, the Julius Sturgis pretzel company invested in its first mechanical pretzel maker and moved its factory out of Lititz to Reading, PA. By that time, Julius was long gone and his grandson Marriott was running the business along with his uncle Tom Keller. Today, the company sells "Tom Sturgis" pretzels, but its still family owned and they use the same recipe as they did back in 1861 when Julius started the business.  To this day, 80% of all pretzels made in the US are made in Pennsylvania.

We probably ate six soft pretzels at the bakery that day and they were chewy and flavorful. On our way out of the historic building, we were given small bags of Tom Sturgis hard pretzels and that night we popped open a bag. They are unlike any hard pretzel I've ever tasted, light and crispy and not dry or crumbly. They're delicious. So, if you're ever tooling through Pennsylvania and feel like getting off the beaten path, I highly recommend a stop in Lititz for a pretzel and some fine tales of pretzel making history.