Shelly Stern has always had a knack for finding and telling stories, and what goes better with storytelling than food? If you hang out in the Belmont area long enough, you might find Stern at community events, pedaling around on a three-wheeled bicycle, handing out her homemade soft pretzels and asking for neighborhood tales in return.
“I call myself the Pretzel Pedaler Story Collector,” Stern says.
Like a lot of us in this town, Stern found herself in Charlottesville by chance about 13 years ago, and ended up sticking around. A resident of the neighborhood formerly known as Hogwaller (now considered part of Belmont), Stern has taken it upon herself to breathe life back into the neighborhood’s past, and she’s doing so with homemade soft pretzels.
“It’s a food that I found that people really enjoy,” says Stern. “Pretzels are pretty familiar, and we found that it’s something we can bake at relatively high temperatures in the earth oven.”
Stern recruited neighborhood families to help her build an old-timey wood-fired stove in her backyard last year, and even the oven itself has a story. She says the bricks used to be part of an old building nearby that was torn down and the clay came from a construction site down the street. It was a group effort from the beginning, and now the process of making the pretzels has turned into a community affair.
“In olden times people used to come together to bake,” she says.
As for the pretzels themselves, Stern draws on her heritage and uses a traditional German recipe, giving it a taste of home with Devils Backbone Vienna Lager. From start to finish it’s a lengthy process, and she has to make the dough at least a day before baking to allow it to ferment. Once it’s ready to go, she invites neighbors, especially kids, over to learn the process and help her roll out the dough.
“I liken the process of baking to the story collecting,” she says, adding that building a fire in the oven, keeping it stoked and baking the pretzels is an all-day event. “It takes a long time, you have to feed it, and it’s the same as the relationship-building piece.”
For Stern, it’s less about the food and more about the people, and there’s just something about gathering around an outdoor wood-fired oven, waiting to taste something you just made with your own hands. Next on the horizon is homemade mustard, she says. She serves several store-bought varieties with the pretzels (horseradish, sriracha, Grey Poupon, honey), and she recently planted some mustard greens in her backyard in an effort to make the experience even more homegrown.
Other projects of hers include a new community garden in Rives Park, and a puppet show featuring some of the tales she’s gathered from the neighborhood—like the ones about Gunk the monkey, who lived with two local brothers in the 1950s and could be seen cruising around the neighborhood with them on their bicycles.
If you’re interested in bringing the Pretzel Pedaler to your next event, e-mail Stern at shellbellding@gmail.com.