Spanisch Brötli

Spanisch Brötli

Alternative names	Spanisch Brödli, Spanischbrötli, Spanischbrödli
Type	Pastry
Course	Dessert / snack
Place of origin	Switzerland
Region or state	Baden
Created by	Spanish traditional food
Serving temperature	At room temperature or just after cooling
Main ingredients	Flour, hazelnuts, apricot jam

Spanisch Brötli (English: "Spanish bun", also known as Spanisch Brödli, Spanischbrötli or Spanischbrödli) is a speciality pastry from Baden, Switzerland.

It is a light, flaky pastry filled with a mix of roasted, crushed hazelnuts and apricot jam. Its structure has a square of dough for the lower portion, apricot and hazelnut filling for the middle portion, and a square of dough for the upper portion. It has an "X" (or "cross") cut into the top to allow for the food to vent hot air during baking.

History

Spanisch Brötli were first mentioned in a 1701 book by Samuel Hottinger about the city and baths of Baden. Brötli were very popular among wealthy people of Zürich, so their servants had to go 25 km to Baden by foot in the night to be able to buy brötli very early in the morning and to bring them back to the breakfast.

When in 1847 the Swiss Northern Railway, the first railway line in Switzerland, was opened, connecting Zürich and Baden. This allowed Spanisch Brötli to be brought to Zürich in just 45 minutes. Because of that usage of the line it's been called Spanisch-Brötli-Bahn since those times.

During the 20th century these pastries fell out of favour and were almost forgotten until local bakeries revived the recipe in 2007, creating some new variants. Nowadays the pastry is sold under a trademark Spanischbrödli.

See also

• Brotli, the open-source data-compression library
• Culinary Heritage of Switzerland

External links

• Spanischbrötli's entry in the Database of Culinary Heritage of Switzerland (Der Datenbank von Kulinarisches Erbe der Schweiz)
• Lamiacucina's article on Spanisch Brötli featuring photographs