Swiss-Born Baker Taking Wyoming By Storm With Her Traditional Bread

A Swiss woman who moved to Carpenter, Wyoming, with her boyfriend was feeling a bit nostalgic one day for the foods she grew up with back home.

So, Samira Tennyson made a little post on Facebook, asking a simple question: “Who wants some Swiss bread?”

She thought if two or three people were interested, she would be satisfied with that. She could make more friends while making some bread, which is always more fun when others are along for the ride.

And, it would give her a little pocket change to help feed the two horses she recently rescued.

Tennyson didn’t think too much more about her unassuming social media posts offering bread to southeast Wyoming. The posts could have faded away like so many do.

But this one didn’t. In fact, Tennyson has been flooded with so many texts from people clamoring to buy a loaf of her butterzopf bread that she decided to quit her regular job at the Terry Bison Ranch, where she was working as a ranch hand.

She would instead focus full-time on baking the delicious Swiss bread of her youth, all while making new friends along the way.

“There’s a similar bread which is called challah, I think. It’s almost the same recipe,” Tennyson told Cowboy State Daily. “But this is the bread the Swiss eat on Sundays.”

In fact, the special braided bread is so popular for weekends, it’s generally only available Fridays from Swiss grocers.

“And it’s special to me because my grandma and dad, we always got one at the grocery store, and then we started eating it and couldn’t even get home with it,” Tennyson said. So, grandma “had to make another one, and so it was — how do you say — it’s like nostalgic. It’s very special for me.”

Making A Loaf Of Butterzopf Is Easy If You’re Swiss

Europe has many amazing foods, but fresh-baked bread is one that’s commonly available on just about every street corner. The smell of it is everywhere, and to be without it is to be without something deemed almost essential to life.

Tennyson grew up watching her grandmother bake loaves of butterzopf, and Tennyson was herself making loaves of it by the time she was 16.

“Food is the part which I miss here, so I figured, you know, I’m just gonna make it myself,” Tennyson said.

The recipe for butterzopf lands somewhere between challah and brioche, but butterzopf uses butter instead of the oil that’s used for challah, and French brioche is a bit sweeter and lighter than butterzopf, which offers a pleasingly dense, chewy crumb — just like a homestyle loaf baked with love should.

“Zopf,” meanwhile, is a German word for braid — and that is the most distinguishing factor about this Swiss Sunday bread.

“It’s just the same dough, but you roll out two strings, and then you cross each one over the other and kind of braid it,” Tennyson explained. “And there are different ways to braid it. You can do like three strings and then braid it like that, but I do two, which is actually called four-string, but I just call it two.”

Baking butterzopf is a bit time consuming, but no more so than for any other fresh-baked loaf.

“You let it rise for two and a half hours, then you braid the dough and let it rise again for 30 minutes,” Tennyson said. “Then you put egg wash on it and bake it for 35 minutes.”

To bake 15 loaves — sort of a light day for Tennyson lately — she rises at 4 a.m. to start the process of mixing all the dough. She has finished baking all the loaves by around 8 a.m., after which she will personally deliver the baked items that day to her customers, fresh from the oven.

It should be eaten right away to maintain freshness, Tennyson said.

If it has gotten a little stale, though, it’s easy to refresh. It can be rebaked, or slices can be toasted to refresh the texture of the bread.

Using a panini press makes pretty grill marks on the bread that accumulate butter. It’s honestly perfect that way, with a little smear of butter over the top bringing out the bread’s sweetness.

Wild Wyoming Adventures And Horses

Tennyson moved to Wyoming from Switzerland to be with her boyfriend, who is originally from Iowa.

Both of them are loving Wyoming’s wide open, wild spaces and its mountains.

Tennyson is accustomed to mountains being from Switzerland, but she’s not used to the kinds of distances Wyoming has to offer between those mountains.

“Where I live in Switzerland, to go across from one side to the other side, it’s like five minutes,” she said. “Here you can just drive and drive, and I love it.”

Tennyson has been on many outdoor adventures since coming to Wyoming.

“I love hiking, I love skiing, and I just love the nature and the mountains are so beautiful,” she said.

She also loves horses and recently rescued a couple, giving them Native American names, Vhio and Haatali, which mean chief and healer, respectively.

“My mom always had horses in Switzerland and I would ride as well,” she said. “But then school, and job — I didn’t really have time anymore. So, when I came here, I was looking for a while for a horse.”

After a friend rescued a horse from a place in Colorado, Tennyson decided to check into that herself to see if there was a horse for her. Sure enough, she found not one, but two — both big sweethearts.

“They’re both very healthy now,” she said. “And next Wednesday, they’re getting their teeth done.”

That’s all thanks to her butterzopf bread money, Tennyson added.

For Wyomingites who happen to land in Switzerland, Tennyson is quick to suggest going up into the Swiss mountains for adventure.

“We have so many restaurants up in the mountains where you can eat,” she said. “You don’t even have to hike. You can just take the, I think it is called the cable car.”

Many Flavors

While traditional Swiss butterzopf is usually just a plain loaf of braided bread, Tennyson has been experimenting with new and different flavors for her loaves, keeping things interesting. She’s posted about chocolate, cinnamon, raisin and even bacon-flavored loaves at her Facebook page, which she calls Swiss Bliss bakery.

“I had some problems with the cinnamon sugar one at first, because the cinnamon and sugar mixture comes out while baking and would get very dark,” Tennyson said. “It wasn’t like it had a burned flavor, but it was very dark and looked burnt.”

But she has since figured out a solution, with a little bit of artfully arranged parchment paper and aluminum foil.

While the name she’s adopted for her Facebook page suggests she has a bakery, for now Tennyson’s is a 100% home-based operation.

“I did have people from California texting to ask me about the bread,” Tennyson said. “And that would be awesome, but I also I know the food laws are different in each state.”

Tennyson is familiar with Wyoming’s Food Freedom Act, and it’s part of what helped her feel confident in offering her baked bread to the public at large on Facebook.

A woman from Nebraska with a coffee shop has also reached out, asking about her bread, Tennyson said. The Nebraska woman would like to sell the bread at her coffee shop.

Tennyson said she might do that, driving the bread to the shop herself, if she can figure out the different laws involved with sending something like bread across state lines.

Opening a bakery someday, or perhaps just a farm stand, is on her mind — particularly if her butterzopf continues to be as popular as it is now.

“I mean, that would be awesome,” she said. “And that’s definitely my goal. And also, to have different things like Swiss cookies and cakes. But it’s just so much for one person, so I’m going to stick with this right now, and see what opens up.”

Renee Jean can be reached at: Renee@CowboyStateDaily.com