sewing new drapes

Apart from sewing new drapes for our living room, I tried my hands at two new kinds of bread this weekend. For one, I made another attempt at making baguettes, using Anis Bouabsa's recipe. They turned out much better than last time, and my scoring definitely improves, but I still got way to go.

The other one was Eric Kayser's Tourte de Meule. Those two turned out rather nicely:



Maybe a little dark, but with a nice, crackly crust and a great taste, at least in my eyes. My wife and the rest of the family deemed them 'boring'. But then again, she loves the baguettes, which I found a little uninteresting.
But I'll definitely try the tourte de meule again, maybe I'll even manage to get a more open crumb the next time.

this time of the year - part five

First weekend of November.
Business as usual.
Another round of pre-emptive Christmas baking.

As the dough has been resting in the larder for four weeks now, I baked the Pfefferkuchen.



The dough was astonishingly dry and crumbly this year, and needed a sizeable glug of water to turn smooth again. But on the other hand, the cookies smelled much better than last year, richer and more buttery.

And of course there were the Stollen, like every year.



Entirely contrary to the Pfefferkuchen dough, though, the Stollen dough turned out very wet, bordering on slimy, making it really hard to get decent shapes out of it. Still, about half of the loaves turned out picture perfect, while the other half somehow exploded into shapes that I cannot begin to descripe without resorting to words entirely unsuitable for a site like this.
What a luck they all were instantly covered in a thick coat of icing sugar, hiding beauties and beasts alike.



Both the Stollen and the Pfefferkuchen will now go back to the larder, carefully wrapped and tinned, to rest for another four weeks. And right on the beginning of December, they should be nice and mature and a perfect addition for any cookie platter.

Just so you know there was something else but christmas sweets on our plates this weekend - this is sunday's green prawn coconut curry on pasta, as pretty as they come:



P.S.: It has taken me a little over a year to reach yet another (tiny) milestone of this blog. This is the 100th post here on Nom-Nomnom, and there's definitely more to come. Thanks to all of you who continue to inspire and encourage me to go on cooking, and thanks to all dropping by and commenting.

a clear impression

Just like I get better in cooking since I've started this project, I get better at noticing if a plate is gong to make a good picture or not.

I'm just snapping what's on the table and can't really be bothered with an extra setup and lightning, so taking a good picture of a dish sometimes is close to impossible. I don't necessarily mean taking a technically good pixture, I sure don't have enough of a clue to even start talking about that. But I mean a good picture in terms of conveying a clear impression of the dish, of its tastes and textures.

As I said - sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't.

It didn't work out, for example, with the photograph showing the 'stag bourguinon'. A black puddle next to two yellow triangles definitely isn't my idea of one of my favourite venison dish.

Last night's version of the very same 'stag bourguignon', though, gave me a much, much better opportunity for a good picture:



It's still far from perfect, but so much better already.

47 letters to name a single bread

I have already written about Bäcker Süpke's wholegrain spelt bread with whole grains a few weeks ago.

But since then, I've made this bread several times, and it always turned out flawlessly. It's nothing I could claim any credit for, but I thought it too good a recipe not to post it here. And, seeing how charming Meister Süpke is in his comments, I don't really think he'd mind the extra publicity.

So I sat down and translated the original recipe, hoping to spread this around the blogosphere a little.



There are only two minor changes I made to the original recipe, apart from the translation, that is.

For one, I balked at the thought of adding the soft, boiled grains to the dough at the very beginning and kneading them for half an hour. I feared they would completely disintegrate and so I decided to add them only for the last ten minutes. And it works very well, the grains remain whole and apparently it makes for something like a double hydration technique, with the dough being able to build up strength before I add the final bits of liquid with the grains.

Also, the original recipe calls for a bit of 'Brotgewürz', bread spices. Which is all very nice, but also entirely undefined as far as I know. So I guessed and used ground caraway and coriander seeds in equal proportions. Which turned out to be one of my smarter ideas lately. Both spices blend pitch perfectly with the taste of the spelt, warming and brightening the taste without being really distinguishable on their own.

This bread has become a constant fixture of our diet, and I can only stress that it is the least 'healthy' tasting whole-grain bread I've ever come across. It never stops to amaze me that it's really brown and not grey, that it's rather sticky than crumbly, open-crumbed and yet perfectly sliceable with a nice but demure crunch to the crust.

Roasted in the oven with just a few drops of honey until the corners start to turn dark, this bread makes a perfect treat on its own, or a great coaster underneath a grillt goat's cheese, or basically anything that needs a solid, earthy partner.

The only thing I am not really happy with is the name, unwieldy as it is. Even in German with its infatuation with endless strings of words it's a rare thing to need 47 letters to name a single bread. But for a bread with such a long list of strong points, I am more than willing to put up with a lot, even this behemoth of a name.





Bäcker Süpke's
wholegrain spelt bread with whole grains
(translation and any mistakes are mine)
(makes two 850g loafs)


for the boiled grains
200g spelt grains
400ml water

for the sourdough
340g wholegrain spelt meal
10g ripe sourdough starter
340g warm water

for the soaker
200g wholegrain spelt flour
20g salt
120g water

for the final dough
190g wholegrain spelt flour
10g dry yeast (one sachet)
40g runny honey
1 heaped teaspoon ground caraway
1 heaped teaspoon ground coriander seeds (or more, to taste)

for decoration
rolled spelt, about 2 tablespoons


On the day before baking, bring the grains and the water to boil in a small pot. Cover and leave to simmer gently for about 10 minutes, then take off the flame, stir, and set aside, covered.

Mix all the ingredients for the sourdough until just incorporated. Cover and set aside.

Mix all the ingredients for the soaker until just incorporated. Cover and set aside.

Leave all three bowls to ferment overnight in a cool room, but not the fridge, for a minimum of 16 hours.

On the day of baking, combine the sourdough, the soaker and the final ingredients in the bowl of your mixer and knead at lowest speed for twenty(sic) minutes.
I am not kidding. The original recipe says twenty minutes and the dough really needs every second of it. You'll see, in this case it makes all the difference between wet flour and a dough.

Leave to proof for an hour.

Deflate the dough and add the boiled, cold grains.
The original recipe says to discard eventually remaining water, but I add it to keep the amount of added water identical each time. Never had much of it left with the grains, anyway.

Knead at low speed for another ten minutes.
That's half an hour kneading all together. Any wheat dough would be a neat rubber ball by now, but here, it just works perfectly.

Pour into a rectangular baking tin lined with non-stick paper. Even the dough and cover loosely with the rolled spelt.

Leave to proof in a warm place for about an hour to one hour and a half.
The dough will increase about 20% in volume at most, and when ready will stop springing back if gently poked.

Preheat your oven to 220°C. Bake with steam for the first minutes and immediately reduce temperature to about 160°C.

Bake for 100 minutes.

Take out and leave to cool on a rack. Rest a day or at least until fully cooled before cutting.

Freezes perfectly well, and tastes especially well toasted.
We usually bake on stock and freeze the sliced  bread, thawing individual slices in the toaster. Talk about two sparrows and one stone.


Some more wise remarks of Bäcker Süpke:

• Always add all the salt to the soaker. Otherwise, the enzymes of the wholegrain flour will produce harmful byproducts leading to a grumbling stomach.
• Wholegrain doughs, especially wholegrain spelt doughs, have to be wet - rather add a little more water.
• Bake long and 'slow' to get all that moisture out of the bread.
• Always use very little yeast and long final proofs, else you wouldn't get a sliceable bread.
• Playing with the honey and the spices is a great way of tweaking this recipe!

P.S.: And once more, this post wil be sent to the YeastSpotting section of Susan's formidable blog Wild Yeast, a home baker's resource I can hardly recommend too much.

one of the nicest gifts

Last weekend, my parents came over for my father-in-law's birthday. And my dad brought me a special gift: a pot of rillettes, made by himself, after this recipe.



Of course he tweaked the recipe a little, but still. Does it make any sense that I feel poud about this? I mean, like, really happy and proud. Maybe it's the fact that my site here inspired him to cook something nice, my parent taking a clue from something I did.

What ever it it, that little pot is one of the nicest gifts I've been given in quite a while.

stuffed like Hobbits

Other people have Halloween, we in our family have my father-in-law's birthday.

Not that I'm implying it's a scary event, but there is a certain amount of suspense involved every year. He likes to have themed dinners for his birthday, and after last year's classic German sixties buffet, we decided to aim higher and try to set up a proper Hawaiian luau.

Well, 'proper' in this regard surely is something of a stretch, as we have no beach, the weather here currently is nothing but drizzle, and definitely nothing tropical on offer right now. And I sure as hell wasn't going to go into our muddy garden and dig up an imu for a slow-roasted pig.

So, a little bit like last year, we didn't take the truly scientfic route and instead decided to stick with our idea of a luau - and it turned out pretty great, actually.

We had pulled porc made with liquid smoke in the oven, pineapple chutney and another one with green tomatoes. There were cheap silk flower leis for the ladies and equally thrifty shirts for the guys in lurid colours and palm leaves on the table.

We had honey-garlic meatballs, coconut-crusted prawns and lime-cured salmon salad, enough rice and sweet potatoes to feed a whole army. And of course, Mai Tais and beer, wasabi-crusted peanuts and what felt to me like one hundred nibbles I am too lazy to list up. We finished with coconut muffins and pineapple parfait, stuffed like Hobbits.

It was great, great fun and exceedingly exotic for German standarts. I learned a lot, and the coconut prawns with pineapple chutney were a real keeper.

Now all I have left to do is clean up the kitchen and then kick off my shoes for a truly lazy sunday afternoon of doing nothing. Aloha.

sunny side up

The first time I heard of a 'fried egg cake', it was when some friend at school invited me over. His mother had some leftover cake from a birthday, and there would even be said 'fried egg cake'.

As I am struck with the mixed blessing of an extremely vivid and active imagination, the prospect filled me with disgust and fascination at the same time. Of course, I agreed.

It was both a relief and a disappointment when the 'fried egg cake' turned out not to contain even a single fried egg. Instead, it only looked like a platter of fried eggs, with dozens of halved apricots shining like so many sweet yolks, sunny side up.



Over the years, I have come across countless versions of this cake, and probably every household in Germany has its own.

This is my take on the 'fried egg cake, and it actually is one of my favourites. I love the combination of a crispy, crunchy base, creamy but not too custardy topping with chunks of tangy fruit and the bright notes of apricot jam spiked with lemon juice.

Unfortunately, this is one of the few cases my wife and I wholeheartedly disagree - while a crunchy base for me is an absolute must, she can't stand it. Actually, she would prefer me not to blind bake the base at all, turning the whole thing into a spoonable dessert rather than a cake to be eaten in slices.

Well, as much as I adore her, no chance in hell with this cake. It's mine.





fried egg cake (sunny side up)
(one baking sheet of 16 decent helpings)


for the pastry base
500g all-purpose flour
250g cold butter in small pieces
100g unrefined cane sugar
10g vanilla sugar
a pinch of salt
1 egg

for the batter
600g creamcheese
100g sugar
2 tablespoons corn- or potato-starch
20g vanilla sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
a pinch of salt
3 eggs

topping
about 700g canned apricots without sirup

glaze
2 tablespoons apricot jam
one teaspoon of lemon juice


Preheat your oven to about 180°C.

Combine all the ingredients for the pastry base in the bowl of your mixer. Using the whisk attachment, mix until crumbs form, about the size of coarse sand to small peas.
Once you are beyond the 'small pea' stage, it'll take only a few seconds more before the dough coalesces into one single, solid lump. Which isn't a real problem, but hard on your mixer and means additional work when rolling out the dough.

Line a high-rimmed baking sheet with non-stick paper. Pour in the crumbs and distribute them evenly, then press down (or roll out) and close any eventual gaps.
There's no need to form a rim as long as the baking sheet is high enough.

Bake blind for about 15 minutes, take out as soon as the first spots start to brown.

Meanwhile, mix all the ingredients for the batter except the eggs. Once the mix is smooth, add the eggs, one by one, always mixing until you have a smooth batter before adding the next egg.

Take out the base and pour the batter onto the hot pastry.
Please take note that this is the amount of batter filling my high-rimmed baking sheet as it should. That is, about a finger wide on top of the pastry. Your's may vary.

Put the apricots into the batter, with their rounded side up. Try to distribute them evenly across the whole cake.
Canned apricots can be a little difficult to get onto the dough 'sunny-side up', as the slippery bastards always try to end up the other way round. At least, that's what they do with me. If one of your apricots gets 'battered', take it out again and clean it under the tab - it'll just look odd and messy if you don't. (Actually, I always take more apricots than I need and eat those I dropped into the batter. Just between you and me...)

Reduce the oven temperature to 160°C and bake the cake until the batter is firm(ish) and starts to brown.
Traditionally, the batter should just set and shouldn't brown at all. But as I am one of those persons who like the fried eggs with a tiny, crispy golden fringe, I actually like it when my cake looks at least golden and not so anaemic.

Put the apricot jam into a small bowl and warm gently until runny.
A few seconds in the microwave should do the trick nicely.

Add the lemon juice and stir until smooth.
You could run the jam through a sieve at this point to get an extra-glossy finish, but I usually skip this part.

Take the cake out of the oven and glaze with the apricot jam while still hot.

Leave to cool slightly, then slice into squares. Best served warm and on its own, though still works nicely with vanilla ice-cream.

Keeps well for a few days, but gets messy when stacked. Try not to store in the fridge, as the jam glaze will attract even more moisture there and can turn the cake soggy overnight.