#1000Kitchens: Hutzelbrot with Dina Weber in Mysore

#1000Kitchens is a series that goes into kitchens all over the country, documenting heirloom recipes that tell a story. In this edition, Dina Weber of SAPA Bakery bakes hutzelbrot, a German fruit bread that has been in her family for generations.

It is 8 AM in Mysore. The wide tree-lined streets crawl into narrow lanes with creaky two-storey houses. A straggly queue forms fast outside Vinayak Mylari. The city’s soft, floppy dosas drenched in ghee, half-soaked in a grainy puddle of coconut chutney, are good reason to be up early on a Tuesday morning. The server unceremoniously plucks a dosa from a tray piled high, and drops one into each plastic plate. “Idlis have run out,” he announces, “and we only serve coffee.” So if you’re a chai-drinker, don’t bother.

The darshini is a short drive from Dina Weber’s apartment, where life holds a very different energy. The walls are lined with bookshelves, a blown-glass lamp lights the corner by a window, and a pot of coffee waits on the table. Her daughter Marta is drawing, belly-down on the cool floor.

Dina is a woman of contradictions. She has the softness of a baker, moving in a cloud of apples and vanilla, working in a craft that hinges on precision. Her face is in constant motion, lighting up in a series of expressions that are very south Indian, despite her German roots. She is best known as the founder of SAPA bakery, a Mysore brand that has built a loyal customer base around the country. She is baking hutzelbrot today, a fruit bread recipe she has been working to recreate, partly from memory. We received a loaf from a previous iteration in the mail last week.

We follow Dina past the coffee pot, into the kitchen, where she has soaked a batch of dehydrated fruit in cider. “Moonshine helped me with this — they sent me yeast and walked me through inoculating it.” Hutzelbrot is almost cake in how intensely fruity it is. But without eggs, it lasts considerably longer. Dina presses the fruit into a sieve, saving the cider for later. Her ingredients are measured and ready. We’ve never been in such an organised kitchen, we remark. Dina laughs and blames the habit on her years conducting baking workshops.

Before SAPA, Dina came to India as a high school grad on her gap year. “No one believed a bakery in Mysore could be sustainable, let alone successful, so I would travel around the country doing baking workshops.” Five years later, mother to a 6-year-old, and owner of a very successful bakery and café, SAPA now has a customer base that extends to the furthest corners of the country, and Dina has almost no time for workshops.

Her travel in those early years allowed her to get to know India deeply, and build a strong social network. “That’s how I met Bani (Nanda), and Gauri (Devidayal) and Akhila (Srinivas). To have this network of women who have so much experience, but also the grace and kindness to explain things to you in simple language… has been incredible.”

Dina shakes a few spoons of rye and bread flour over the fruit, using her hands to bring the dough together. “It is a very sticky dough, because it is mostly fruit,” she explains. It is also the reason this bread will never make it to the SAPA menu— “It would be too expensive. And also, this is a precious family recipe, and somethings are meant to be eaten at home.”

Her response to the steady interruption of children is gentle; pausing mid-sentence to address every complaint and question with generosity. Underneath that gentleness, there is a quiet grit; the steady resolve of a woman who gets it done. “My mum used to say – when you have kids, you never have an option. ‘You have to wake up in the morning and get breakfast going.’ That applies to business, and to life. You simply have to get up and do it. No one else is going to.”

She sinks into the couch, cupping the mug of coffee she has just refilled. “Christmas baking is a whole other thing at home — we would do gingerbread cookies, cake, challah bread, spiced biscuits with honey, meat and game. Baking was just part of growing up, something you do with your mum and grandmum.”

Dina’s family, originally from the Black Forest region of Germany, is agricultural. For her mother, a mathematician by training, gardening and cooking were a big part of life. “In our family, everyone returns home for the apple harvest. My uncle has pigs, so we make our own sausages; and my aunt makes schnapps and jams because we have fruit trees.” For Dina’s confirmation, the family baked 200 linzer tarts to distribute to the congregation.

Hutzelbrot is steeped in memories of her grandmother. Through the late summer months, she would carefully dehydrate the plums, apples and pears from her garden. Come December, they were revived with water and schnapps, mixed with blackflour, sugar and spice, to be baked into hutzelbrot, an ancient predecessor of the stollen we know today, to send to her daughter and granddaughter. “I remember eating this so vividly,” Dina slathers a thick layer of butter onto a slice she has just cut from the loaf. Plump and moist, the bread is dense with fruit and nut, fragrant with the aroma of yeast and cider. It seems like the perfect food to cosy up with on cold winter days, each bite a memory of summer, sunshine and fruit trees.

After her grandmother passed, the recipe fell out of family tradition. But over the last month, Dina and her mother have been on the phone, talking, testing, sharing notes, to recreate the hutzelbrot of their memories. Dina is now so embedded in Mysore culture, she compares baking to cooking sambar. “Once you understand the basics of how much dal to how many people, you can play around with the masala a bit,” she nods.

The SAPA (meaning sourdough and pastry) logo is a loaf of bread with vanilla, wheat, and flaxseed flower. “You get it all here! I find that amazing about India. In our climate zone in Germany, a lot has to be imported. But unless you want blueberries, you can get everything locally in India – chocolate, coffee wheat, sugar, coconut, butter, vanilla!”

Dina started SAPA on savings. “People say it is not a good business because our material costs are huge, almost 45% — I should be keeping it at 18%. That’s more than 20% profit I’m losing right there. But with pastry you can’t compromise on good butter, good chocolate. And of course, I can’t price things like one would in Bombay.”

Nonetheless, on a weekday afternoon, SAPA is alive with a warm, electric energy. Customers line up, familiar with the ordering process, waiting their turn. There are diners from Bangalore and Pune today; one with a phone in hand, photographs the lilly pond and SAPA’s beautiful facade — an old Mysore home from the 40’s.

“When I started, I did everything myself — the photos, the baking, the testing. We’re 50 people now – not a small team!” Already in their third space over four years, does she hope to grow into a country-wide chain? “What we do here, the hospitality — that is hard to scale. The baking itself is controlled, and easy to replicate, but hospitality is more holistic. There are guests who have been coming here for 2-3 years. They want to come exactly here on a Sunday afternoon, where they know Vinod who serves them. So no, I don’t see us expanding. But maybe a different concept…there is so much to explore here in Mysore, where I can add value.”

DINA WEBER’S RECIPE FOR HUTZELBROT

Ingredients
500 g black flour (a mix of rye and white flour)
150 ml water
11 g salt
8 g yeast
250 g dehydrated pear
250 g dehydrated plum
150 g sugar
250 g raisins
250 g mixed nuts
1 tsp cinnamon
Pinch of powdered clove
250 ml cider

Method
Soak the dehydrated pear in cider for 24 hours
Soak the remaining fruit and nuts with water overnight
Strain the liquids, saving the juices
Use some of the cider to active the yeast with sugar
Add this to the fruit and nuts, with flour, salt and spices, and mix well
Add only as much liquid as needed to bring all fruits and dry ingredients together
Allow it to rest in a baking dish for 3 hours
Bake in a pre-heated oven for 45 minutes at 200 degrees