Heike wished for fried potatoes for her Blog-Birthday. I liked fried Potatoes in all variations, made of raw potatoes or cooked and cooled potatoes.
When my boyfriend asked for fried potatoes for supper it was the perfect moment to hit two birds with one stone. I could make him happy with delicious fried potatoes and could also participate at Heikes Blog event.
Yes, this will be no post for all of us who new years resolution is healthy wholesome eating. And I have to admit that after one slice of this bread I head to it a lot of fruits and vegetables to save my conscience. But (and here are now the excuses why I baked it anyway) it was love on first sight and I need a complex bread for relaxing because of all the stress I have in the last month before starting to write my Ph.D. thesis.
The idea for this bread had TXfarmer who baked some time ago a “Lamminated Sandwich Bread”. Her bread looks better then mine, she really knows how to bake laminated pastry. Her Croissants are a dream! The dough is a soft sandwich bread laminated with butter. After a single and a double fold the dough is cut into stripes and braided.
I did some modifications so that the recipe fits better to the weaker german flour. And this time I mixed the butter for laminating with some flour to make the handling easier. It works good for puff pastry for me and it helps here, too.
And how tastes this bread? A soft and evenly open crumb with a divine taste of butter, like a good croissant.
I have to take one look back at christmas. Every year we have a cheese fondue with the family at the 26. December which normally is prepared by my grandaunt. It started once small with my grandparents and their daughters, but nowadays we have to rend a room because for all the children plus partners, the grandchildrens with partners and the contiously rising number of great-grandchildren is no space in grandmothers kitchen anymore.
I normally help my grandaunt with the her preparations (continuously stirring the melting cheese). This year she called to ask me if I could do the cheese fondue on my own because she fell down a stair and had some broken ribs. She already bought everything needed and would write me a recipe, and would be around if I had questions. I said yes, of course. The recipe get lost when she and my granduncle travelled to us, and so she wrote down the short version for me: 5.5 kg cheese, 3 litre white wine, 6 teaspoons starch for each pot (4 pots at all). This is the amount for about 25 persons – most of the small kids prefer chocolate fondue.
I calculated it down for 5 persons:
And now we have 2012. I hope your new years eve was nice as the one we had!
We tried already our new year pretzel for a late breakfast, so there are no pictures of the pretzel as a whole.
This year I decided to bake it with a mild sourdough, water roux and less sugar. I kept the sourdough overnight at 25°C which gave it a delicious smell like yoghurt and slightly sour taste, which makes it perfect for a sweet dough.
The dough itself is very soft. Experience with handling soft dough is required, so for beginners I would suggest to prepare the dough with 50-60g less water. That would make handling much easier.
I kneaded the dough very long, so the gluten network was well developed and the bread could rise highly. Using Egg white keeps the crumb bright and white. I think its fit to the fresh new years morning and I used some frozen egg white from christmas baking.
The pretzel has a nice complex taste, a little bit of youghurt and has this slightly sweetness, that fits so well to both sweet jam and salty cheese.