Visiting Lititz

We looked into factory tours that were available near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and found that there was a Pretzel Factory tour in Lititz, so we decided to visit that on Thursday...

Carl said that the town looked like a setting for a Hallmark movie!

In front of the pretzel shop...

"On this site in 1861 Julius Sturgis established the first pretzel bakery in the new world. This tablet dedicated by the National Pretzel Bakers Institute, May 1951, Alex V. Tisdale, Pres."

We purchased our tickets for the tour... and had a few minutes to look around...

The waiting area had some pretzel jokes:

The tour started with us being trained as pretzel twisters...

We started with a wad of dough...

We were instructed to roll out the dough to about the length of the wooden dowels...

Our tour guide was a nice young woman, I think Arabella was her name. She said that the children in the Sturgis family learned to twist pretzels starting when they were 4 years old!

Make a U of your rolled-out dough.

The story is that the twisted pretzel was created by a monk in the 600s AD. The dough is made into a "U" with its arms raised in prayer,

Cross the arms as in supplication,

Make the "knot" ("tying the knot")

Make little indentations in the lower loop...

... roll the knot down so the ends cross at the small indentations...

... turn the twisted dough upright so again its arms reach up in prayer! The 3 holes are also said to represent the Trinity!

We got certificates....

We'll need to update our resumes!!!

Some of the mixing and rising equipment in the old bakery...

Baking ovens

Arabella got two of the youngest members of our pretzel twisting group to help her in preparing the pretzels for baking.

A mechanical pretzel twister

An old photograph of a lot of pretzel twisters making pretzels.

Julius Sturgis' story was that he worked in the bakery of a soft pretzel baker, the only type of pretzels that were made at the time. His job was to scrape out the oven after the baking for the day was done. He often got burned, so decided to change his oven-clean-out time to early morning, when the ovens were cool. He discovered that the fragments that had been left to dry overnight were crunchy and tasty! He continued working at that bakery for several more years, but eventually created his own bakery connected to his home in Lititz, which is where our tour was conducted. 

They now make the hard pretzels using an extrusion process at a factory that is outside of town...

... but inside the bakery/tour area, they still make soft pretzels...

... and bake them in a pizza oven onsite, and sell them in the store in the front of the house!

I got in line to purchase soft pretzels to enjoy as we headed to our next tour of the day...while Carl headed out behind the shop...

Carl had read that there was a coffee roaster in the back of the pretzel shop building... "Whiff Roasters"... so he headed around to their shop...

Carl got a sample pack...

...and then we were off to our next destination! More in a later post!