Bäckerei Kleinert

Kleinert has run its bakery in Leipzig-Lindenau as a family business since 1950, sourcing flour from small mills in Leipzig-Engelsdorf, Niederwiesa and the Erzgebirge region rather than industrial suppliers. Bread dough is still worked by hand — "Alle Brotteige arbeiten wir noch von Hand auf," the bakery states — and each roll is shaped individually before baking.

The bakery's signature is the Original Leipziger Lerche, a shortcrust pastry with a history tied to an actual songbird. Roasted lark was a popular Leipzig delicacy into the 1870s — as many as 400,000 birds were sold in a single year in the early 18th century — until King Albert of Saxony banned lark hunting in 1876 to protect the species. Leipzig's bakers responded with a sweet substitute: a shortcrust shell filled with crushed almonds and a cherry standing in for the bird's heart, topped with a lattice of crossed dough strips recalling the original pastry crust. The name "Leipziger Lerche" has been a protected term of the Saxon bakers' guild since 1998.

Alongside the Lerche, Kleinert bakes Saxon stollen and wedding and celebration cakes, and belongs to the Landesinnungsverband Saxonia, the regional bakers' guild. The business is one of many small Leipzig bakeries carrying a pastry tradition that began, unusually, as a way of replacing a food that was banned rather than one that fell out of fashion.