Bredele in Colmar: the Advent cookies, what to buy, what to avoid

Overview

Bredele are not one cookie but a whole category: the small Christmas cookies that an Alsatian household bakes through Advent, several kinds at once, and keeps in tins to put out for anyone who visits until the holidays are over. The word is dialect, a diminutive of “bread”, so roughly “little breads”. The spelling shifts across Alsace, bredele, bredala or bredle depending on the town and on who is writing, and all of them mean the same tins.

They belong to the region, not to this city alone. Every town and village in Alsace bakes them, and the German-speaking world across the Rhine has close relatives under other names. Colmar’s claim is not a recipe of its own but the setting: its Christmas markets are among the region’s best known, and in late November and December bredele are sold from bakery counters and market stalls all over the old town. There is no protected designation and no official list of varieties, and no family would accept one.

What makes them a tradition rather than a product is the assortment. A household might bake five kinds or fifteen, each with its own texture: short and buttery, crisp and airy, chewy with nuts, spiced. The point is variety on one plate, and the honest truth is that most bredele eaten in Alsace are homemade. What a visitor buys is the shop’s version of a family’s tin, and the best of them taste like exactly that.

What to order

Bredele are bought, not ordered: by weight, loose in a bag, or in a mixed assortment. The names worth knowing, because they are what is written on the labels:

• butterbredele — the plain butter cookie, rolled and cut into stars, hearts, trees and moons, usually brushed with egg yolk so the top shines. It is the base of every tin and the clearest test of a baker: it should taste of butter and nothing else.
• anisbredele — small, pale anise cookies made from eggs, sugar and flour, left to dry before baking so they rise with a smooth cap on a little ruffled base, the “foot”. Hard and crisp, more like a light meringue than a butter cookie. The foot is the sign they were made properly; flat, cracked ones are the failed batch.
• spritzbredele — butter dough piped or pressed into ridged rings or sticks. Crumbly and plain, often half-dipped in chocolate.
• schwowebredele — “Swabian” bredele: ground almonds, cinnamon and citrus zest, cut into shapes and glazed. Denser and more aromatic than the butter kind, and for many people the one that tastes most of Christmas.
• zimtsterne — cinnamon stars: almond and cinnamon dough topped with a white meringue glaze. Gluten-free by nature, chewy inside, and among the more expensive because almonds make up most of the dough.
• kokosbredele — small coconut macaroons, browned at the tips.

A mixed bag is the natural first purchase, because the assortment is the whole idea. If a counter sells them separately, a few of each of the butter, anise and Swabian kinds gives a fair picture of the tradition in three textures.

Two things to know about the vocabulary. Pain d’épices, the honey-spiced gingerbread sold in loaves and iced hearts at the same stalls, is a different Alsatian tradition and not a bredele, however close it sits on the shelf. And mannele, the little brioche figures baked for Saint Nicholas in early December, are bread rather than cookies; they share a season, not a category.

What to avoid

The thing to watch is the fat. A butter cookie made without butter is the commonest substitution, and it is printed on the label if you read it: pur beurre means butter only, while matière grasse végétale or margarine in the ingredients means the cheaper version. The difference is obvious in the mouth, and the butter cookie is where it shows most.

Decorated souvenir tins, with half-timbered houses and storks on the lid and a long list of ingredients on the back, are mostly industrial assortments made to keep for months. They are pleasant enough and they are not what an Alsatian kitchen produces. A tin is worth buying for the tin; for the cookies, look for a bag filled at the counter.

Uniformity is the other tell. Home-style bredele are slightly uneven: shapes cut by hand, glazes that pool differently, anise caps of varying height. An assortment in which every variety has the same color, the same snap and the same faint taste of vanilla flavoring has come from one industrial dough with different cutters.

Finally, freshness has a calendar. Most varieties keep for weeks in a tin, which is why the tradition exists, but bredele sold well outside the season have usually been made for shelf life rather than for Christmas. Buy them in Advent, when bakeries make them in quantity and turn the stock over fast.

Practicalities

The season is the season: bakeries begin putting bredele out around the start of Advent, in late November, and sell them through Christmas, with the stock thinning in the last days before the holiday as households finish their own baking. In the rest of the year many bakeries do not make them at all, or keep only a token butter or anise variety.

Bakery bredele are sold by weight, and a fair range is roughly €3 to €6 per hundred grams, with almond-heavy kinds such as cinnamon stars at the top. A bag of a couple of hundred grams is the usual purchase and is plenty for two people to taste the assortment. A price well below that range almost always means vegetable fat or an industrial batch; well above it, at a market stall in the busiest streets, you are paying the market’s rent, and the same cookies are often sold at a bakery counter a few streets away.

The market stalls are busiest in the evenings and on weekends, especially Saturday, when the old town fills with day visitors. A bakery on a weekday morning is calmer and is where the batch is freshest. Cards are accepted in most bakeries, but cash makes the small market purchases quicker.

They travel well, which is their great advantage as something to take home: wrapped and kept dry, butter bredele last a couple of weeks and the anise and almond kinds longer. Packing them in a box rather than loose in a bag is what keeps the stars intact.

In an Alsatian home bredele are offered with coffee or tea, or with a glass of mulled wine in the evening; a French speaker will ask for them as petits gâteaux de Noël, and a dialect speaker will simply say bredele.