People spell it six different ways when they order from us, and every one of them is right somewhere. Here is where each name comes from — and what the knot in the middle was originally supposed to be.
They are not different products. They are the same word arriving in different places at different times.
Standard German
The dictionary spelling, understood everywhere in Germany.
Bavaria, Austria
Same word, southern ending. What you order in Munich.
Bavarian dialect
How it is actually said at a Bavarian beer garden.
Alsace, France, Switzerland
The French and Swiss spelling, with the extra t.
Technically correct
Lye pretzel — names the process, not just the shape.
English, USA, New Zealand
The anglicised spelling that travelled with emigrants.
The Latin word bracchium means arm. Its diminutive, brachiatellum, described something with little arms — and that is what the loop in the middle of a pretzel is: two arms crossed or folded over each other. Old High German turned that into brezitella, which shortened over centuries into Brezel, softened into Breze and Brezn in the south, gained a t as it crossed into French-speaking Alsace as Bretzel, and finally lost its b altogether when German emigrants took it to America and English speakers wrote down what they heard: pretzel.
Spelling is trivia. The real confusion is that two very different foods share one name.
Want the detail on the lye? What makes a Laugenbrezel →
Spelling, origin, soft versus hard, and what to call them here.
All three are the same word. Brezel is standard German, Bretzel is the French and Swiss spelling, and pretzel is the English form that came out of German-speaking emigration to the United States. Breze and Brezn are the southern German versions.
From Latin. Bracchium means arm, and the diminutive brachiatellum described the shape of crossed or folded arms — which is what the knot in the middle of a pretzel is meant to look like. Old High German turned that into brezitella, and every modern spelling descends from it.
A German soft pretzel is fresh bread, eaten the day it is baked, with a dark shiny crust and a soft chewy inside. The hard pretzel sold in packets is a dried, shelf-stable snack. Same shape and same name, entirely different food.
The lye bath. Before baking, the shaped dough is dipped in a food-grade lye solution (Lauge in German), which is what produces the dark colour and the distinctive flavour. Without it you have a bread knot, not a Laugenbrezel.
Most people here say pretzel and everyone will know what you mean. We call ours Brezels because that is what they are — the German soft kind, made the German way.
Hand-rolled, lye-dipped and baked fresh in Rangiora. Delivered across the Waimakariri, or find us at one of our Saturday markets.
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