a A new home-based business in the Ahwatukee Foothills is serving up a taste of Germany, and the response has been so enthusiastic that the owners had to double production just a few weeks after opening.
Zsuzsanna (pronounced “Susanna”) Anderson launched Oma's German Kitchen online on May 27 to bring authentic, high-quality Old World recipes to the East Valley.
“Oma” is an affectionate German term for “grandmother” or “grandmother,” and she is expecting her first grandchild in September this year.
So far, Anderson has sold baked goods such as Bavarian pretzels, hefezop (brioche buns), krapfen/berliners (jelly doughnuts), kaiser rolls, strudel, rhubarb meringue cake, marble bundt cake and poppy seed braids.
She plans to serve homemade German dinners every week once Arizona's expanded home cooking law goes into effect in mid-September, allowing home-based businesses to sell fresh produce.
Anderson also sells her baked goods at Honeymoon Sweets European Bakery in Tempe and has plans to add a few wholesale clients, but individual demand keeps her busy.
“I was really surprised by the response,” she said. “The response was immediate.”
Initially, Anderson started out with just a double oven and a regular stand mixer, and was able to make 12 pretzels every 20 minutes.
She quickly needed to purchase a commercial mixer, but was lucky to find one online for a fraction of the retail price, and also had the added bonus of getting a second double oven installed for free by a friend with an electrical license.
“We started off with a small home production in the first week and now we're producing six dozen pretzels an hour,” Anderson said.
Braided poppy seeds are one of the dishes Oma's German Kitchen is encouraging its Facebook fans to check out.
Anderson will post the lineup on Sunday or Monday on Oma's German Kitchen's Facebook page and on her page on the Bakesy app, and customers can order online and pick up on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from her home near East Chandler Boulevard and South 44th Street, not far from the Ironwood Library.
Anderson believes the secret to their success is quality: all their ingredients are organic and they only use grass-fed butter rather than vegetable oils.
“I'm trying to recreate the German taste, and I can't do that if I'm buying restaurant quality,” Anderson said.
While the products are premium, the prices are not: pretzels are $2.50 each or $24 a dozen, kaiser rolls are $1.50 each or $15 a dozen, and berlin rolls are $3 a dozen or $30 a dozen. All prices are listed on Bakesy's order page.
Anderson also urges customers to pick up their orders the same day they come out of the oven to guarantee quality.
Pretzels will be available on Thursdays, Kaiser rolls on Fridays and brioches and krapfen on Saturdays.
“In Germany, it's a mortal sin to sell baked goods that are one day old,” she explained, but if you order a whole strudel or cake, you can specify a pickup date.
Anderson also provides instructions on Oma's German Kitchen's Facebook page for properly storing baked goods and keeping them fresh, in case customers aren't able to eat all of them in one day.
She also sells frozen, partially baked pretzels and rolls that people can buy and bake whenever they want.
Deb Kinard of Ahwatukee comes from a German family from Wisconsin and is a regular customer.
“Her bread is very similar to what my grandmother made, but hers is so much better,” she says. [locally] Compared to her.”
Rhubarb Meringue Cake is a mouthwatering dessert from Oma's German Kitchen.
Kinnard also said Anderson's bread reminded her of the bread she ate in Europe, where she spent several weeks as a teenager. She tried a variety of types, including pretzels, kaiser rolls and brioche, but suggests lightly toasting the brioche for a BLT sandwich.
She noticed that when she brought her baked goods order home, her car smelled “incredible,” saying, “When you pick it up, it's warm, like it just came out of the oven. It really is!”
Currently, Oma's German Kitchen does not offer any gluten-free products, but Anderson hopes to add some made with einkorn, an ancient wheat that can be eaten by people with gluten intolerances. Anderson has written a cookbook called “Everyday Einkorn,” which is available on Amazon.com.
Anderson is a self-taught baker who says she learned through trial and error while cooking for her large family for years.
She was born in the former East Germany to a German mother and a Hungarian father, but her parents divorced and her mother married a West German man, so Anderson grew up near Munich.
She met her American husband while attending college in Munich in 1999. The two married in 2000 and moved to the United States. She became a U.S. citizen in 2008. The couple has lived in the Valley since 2005 and moved to Ahwatukee in 2020.
Anderson says she uses a long, stainless steel, food-safe table to keep people out of her kitchen while she bakes, and she takes cleanliness and food safety seriously; Kinnard, a customer who came to her house to pick up a shipment, described Anderson's kitchen as “sparkling.”
If the cottage food law is expanded, Anderson plans to add beef roulane and potato dumplings, pork goulash and spaetzle, schnitzel and fries and other European specialties to the weekly menu.
Anderson said that while she has her hands full between caring for her family and running the business, she's “considering” opening a storefront one day.
“Unless there's a sudden demand, I'm not ready to make that commitment yet,” she says, “but if there's an explosion of demand I would.”
To order, search for Oma's German Kitchen on the Bakesy app and Facebook.
