The Original Dresdner Christstollen - a Culinary Ambassador for Christmas in Germany

The Dresdner Christstollen has become a symbol of German Christmas. It is a piece of cultural history, a centuries-old baking tradition, a prevailing passion and, above all, a delicious treat.

Release time : 2018-12-20 09:52:46

source : Dresden Marketing Board

(Source: Dresden Marketing Board)

The Dresdner Christstollen has become a symbol of German Christmas. It is a piece of cultural history, a centuries-old baking tradition, a prevailing passion and, above all, a delicious treat. For centuries, Dresden's bakers and pastry makers have kept up this tradition, passing it on from generation to generation. That and the unique combination of selected ingredients are the secret behind that inimitable stollen taste.

Dresdner Christstollen is only produced in about 120 bakeries and pastry shops in and around Dresden. The original Dresden Christstollen is a raisin stollen that can be recognized by its golden seal of quality.

How a Dresdner Christstollen is Baked

Raisins, butter, sweet and bitter almonds, candied orange and lemon peel, flour, water and yeast are required to be ingredients of the dough. Also, whole milk or whole milk powder, crystal sugar, clarified butter, lemon zest, table salt, powder sugar, stollen spices and spirits are in the laid down recipe of the Stollen Association. An addition of margarine or artificial preservatives and flavors is not allowed. Inspite of the rules for the basic recipe for making Original Dresden Christstollen, each master baker and cake-maker has his own family secret passed down from one generation to the next. A high degree of skill, carefully selected ingredients from far-away lands, along with mysterious spices are combined in a masterful bakery product.

From a fasting bread to a sweet delight

The tradition of baking 'Christstollen’ in Dresden is a very old one. Historians have traced this noble delicacy back to about the year 1400. The Stollen is mentioned for the first time in 1474 in the accounts of the Christian Hospital of St. Bartholomew in Dresden where it is referred to as a cake for the fasting period, consisting of only flour, oats and water as required by Church dogma.

However, without butter and milk the Stollen, also called Striezel, was rather