Monthly Archives: October 2016

October 31st, 2016

Hotdog Rolls

Hotdog-Brötchen (1)Hotdogs would be a good idea for dinner, said my love to me. I had no objections as I had in the freezer some vegetarian “Feuer-Jakob”  made from the recipe of Herr Grün. As rolls we needed homemade ones, of course! And so I fed my favourite preferment and soon afterwards I was happily kneading a dough. With a water roux and some enzym active malt the crumb of the rolls become especially soft and fluffy. To avoid cracks in the crust the rolls have to proof fully before baking – just like a burger roll.

We eat our hotdogs with home made fried onions, homemade pickled cucumbers and – for the vegetarian variant with grilled vegetables and Zucchini-Salsa. A delicious treat!

 

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October 26th, 2016

Rosehip Jam

HagebuttenmarmeladeWhenever I snack tiny spoonful of the delicious rosehip jam, I close my eyes and remember sunlit wild rosebushes on beautiful morning in October. While around our home there are only few bushes with small fruits, in Swabia you can find a lot beautiful fruits. And so we used our saturday morning stroll to pick some fruits. With four people more then a kilogram is fast picked.

The fruits then traveled home with us and the next day I started making jam. Before I checked different methodes and decided to first cook them, puree them and then pass them through different sieves to remove the seeds and seed hairs. Cooking Rosehip Jam is a time consuming task but nevertheless rewarding. I find that adding enough water while passing the fruit pulp through the food mill is crucial to get all of the fruit puree through the

That’s why I ended with 1 kg of Fruit pulp and about 500h of seeds. The pulp I mixed then with half of the amount of sugar and cooked for 2 minutes. Then the jam was nicely thick then and very delicious. To make sure that the jam keeps well (with this low amount of sugar) I decided to sterilize the jam as do I do it for my Zwetschgenmus. And now I enjoy the jam every morning 🙂

 

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October 23rd, 2016

Oberländer Bread

Oberländer Brot (3)The “Oberländer” Bread is a bread with tradition and stormy history: In 1829 the city council of cologne fixed the price for bread. The Bakers did not agree and so the bakers strike started. To get bread for the city, the council ordered bread in the region upriver, the so called “Oberland”. As this region has poor soil, the bread is baked with lots of rye there. This yields a bread with long shelf life and so it could be easily transported down the rhine to cologne. The cologne inhabitants liked the bread very much and even after the strike was ended they insisted on getting their beloved “Oberländer”. And so this bread is baked in cologne until today.

The characteristic shine of the crust is due to a glaze made of starch and water. Another characteristic trait of this bread are the tree slashes across the loaf. It is a mild rye bread with a fine crumb and a long shelf life. It pairs well with both hearty and sweet. And so it is both a beautiful bread for the regionalen Bread series and a good gift for someone who just moved to cologne.

 

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October 20th, 2016

Rosewater Raspberry Macarons

Rosenwasser-Himbeer-Macarons (1)When I read about the “Törtchen-Törtchen book on tour”-Challenge I was hooked. I love baking Mousse-Cakes (Törtchen) and I like Matthias Ludwigs recipes for them. They work well both as whole as you can see here with the Apple tartlets as well as in parts like the sponge here in this Peach recioe.

The sobering came when the book arrived. I had to pick from four: a cupcake (too much buttercream and finding fresh apricots in October would be a  mission impossible),  a brownie filled with fruits (even the picture in the book was not appealing), pecan caramel tartlet (means shortcrust filled with nuts and caramel, sweet and boring) and Macaron lollies (why to put a macaron on a stick?). So I send a mail asking if I could maybe get another recipe, but the answer was short and clear: It had to be one of these four.

Sighed. So Macarons it will be… Continue reading

October 16th, 2016

Kürbisstuten

KürbisstutenIn this year Indian summer lasted long. But now the days are getting shorter and air is chilly when I leave the house in the morning. And when I drive through the range of the hills I can see the first sun rays turning the misty valleys below into golden lakes. It is autumn, finally.

And so a recipe, which I got from a reader some weeks ago, fits into this beginning autumn very well. It is a recipe for pumpkin “Stuten”. Literally the term “Stuten” means “Mare” and my reader was very puzzled about it when she moved to Oldenburg many years ago and the bakeries were advertising “It is Pumpkin-Stuten time again”. But in Westphalia, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein the term means “sweet bread” as well as “horse”. And this pumpkin bread was a steady companion for my reader in the following years.

And when I asked for local recipes she sent a recipe from her kids kindergarten. I modified it strongly (ok, I tore it down and rebuild it from the fragments), so it contains now much less yeast but a preferment and some more liquid, too. And I kneaded the dough much longer as well. All of this together makes the bread irresistibly soft and aromatic. A great bread for autumn!

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October 9th, 2016

Vinschgerl

VinschgerlThe third recipe for my rye bread tribology for the “Schwarzmarkt” is a recipe for Vinschgerl. It is similar to the one I posted back in 2012 but I changed a bit the handling and so I decided to post this one, too. The first thing I changed is the fact that I form the rolls in two batches. The first one after 30 min, the second one after 55 min. So the second batch can proof while the first one is proofing. This makes the time management more easy! The second change is that I learned to steam rye breads with a bit of delay. This improves the “crack-forming” in the crust and yields better looking breads :-).

The flavour of this rolls is perfect for all lovers of spiced bread: With fennel, caraway seeds, coriander and the characteristic “Schabzingerklee” their flavour is delicious and incomparable.

 

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October 1st, 2016

Review: Baking course “Rolls”

Panousi FotografieAbout 200 rolls made from about 12kg flour, that was the outcome of a sucessful bread baking day. The theme of the successful second bread baking course  was “homemade rolls” and took place in “raum44”. I knew already from the first course that my time schedule was working properly but I was a bit nervous anyway. But as soon as the first cheerful participants arrived I relaxed as I realized that this was going to be great day!

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