The reason I'm here is I'm about to fly for the first time since before the war, my destination being Berlin and my company's office Christmas meal there. I naturally had to think carefully before accepting the kind invitation, what with European infection rates being somewhat in the news recently, but it turns out that the numbers are no worse there (specifically where I'm going) than they are here (specifically where I'm coming from), it's just that we've stopped giving a shit and they haven't. Obviously it's still going to feel a bit odd sitting in a metal tube to travel between two places where life is still decidedly, albeit similarly, weird - but I figure if you're ever going to tentatively engage in international travel again, why not do it when you're freshly triple-jabbed and it's on someone else's dime so it's less of a pisser if it somehow all goes wrong? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, that's beside the point. Right now I'm more concerned about the fact that anyone looking over my shoulder is going to wonder what the hell it is I'm doing and why it involves some mashed potato in a frying pan and something that looks almost, but not entirely, quite unlike a strudel.
Still, at least the latter gives us an appropriately German theme for the occasion. So with that in mind, let's lift off and see what November's Random Menu has in store!
◘ THE STARTER ◘
The book: The Silver Spoon
The recipe: p461, "Potato and Cinnamon Frittata"
Interesting start, right? Sure, not necessarily the height of sophistication - but it's not every day you see cinnamon making an appearance in the title of a savoury recipe, for one thing.
Indeed, it piques my interest enough to make me wonder just how cinnamon-y it's going to be.
Ah. Okay then. Apparently a "pinch" of cinnamon is enough to get you a title shout-out these days.
I already have a bad feeling about this one.
That sense of foreboding only intensifies when I realise that what I'm going to be making here isn't something like a Spanish omelette, with chunky slices of potato surrounded by set eggs, but instead... well, read on.
I start by boiling "2 potatoes" (no size, no weight, no mention of peeling them first, etc. - you know my favourite cookbook gripes by now) in salted water until they're mashable.
I then add some milk, butter and salt and beat the potatoes to a purée "with the back of a wooden spoon" - surprisingly fun and successful, actually. Four egg yolks then get stirred through this mixture, which is now extremely gloopy.
Next, I whisk (by hand, no less!) two egg whites until they're fluffy
and stiff, which naturally brings back some bad meringue memories.
These get folded into the potato mixture, then a generous pinch of cinnamon is added...
...along with some salt, and the whole thing is mixed "very gently to avoid knocking out the air".
The only remaining instruction after this is to heat olive oil and butter in a frying pan, pour in the potato mixture, and "cook over a medium heat until browned on both sides".
Whiiiiich is always going to be easier said than done. I mean, just look at the stuff in the bowl above. It's... really quite wet. Even with eggs inside, which famously enjoy setting when cooked, I'm wildly sceptical about how this next step is going to go. And, well:
Now, granted, at this point the base is starting to set slightly and get a little brown. My main issue lies with the "browned on both sides" part of the instruction, because the top 90% of the so-called frittata is still pretty liquidy, but I'm going to have to try and turn it over at some point or the base is going to burn before any of the rest of it has had the chance to cook at all.
And since there's no fucking way I'm going to be able to casually flip this wobbling jelly of potato and egg like it's an inch-thick pancake - as a tentative attempt involving multiple spatulas makes all too clear - the only thing I can think of is to heat a second pan (see above), clamp the pans together like two halves of a clamshell, and flip it over that way.
Give or take some inevitable splitting at the seams, this doesn't not work (and now it really does look like a great big pancake).
Somewhere in the next ten minutes or so, it coalesces into a finished product that is actually a bit set and not overly burnt, and I wasn't really expecting that to happen.
It even allows itself to be sliced into servable wedges.
Unfortunately, the end product is desperately bland. How could it not be? It's some mashed potato fried up with minimal seasoning and, above all, almost no sodding cinnamon.
Sigh.
I mean, can I say it's actively bad? In all honesty, I cannot. A wedge of it would work as one of several side dishes, say. But given the amount of effort involved in creating something so vastly underwhelming, given how much less good it is than dishes that are far easier to make from the same ingredients, and given the lunatic concept of having to try and manhandle a hot lava flow of potato... it's a no from me.
File under: Not one to repeat.
◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘
The book: Good Housekeeping Easy To Make Complete Cookbook
The recipe: p95, "Warming Winter Casserole"
Talk about a say-nothing recipe name (although "warming" immediately gives me grounds for concern that it might involve cinnamon again...).
Spoiler alert, then: It's actually exactly the kind of thing you'd expect, and none the worse for it. I decide to forgive the fact that the recipe gives me a lot of wiggle room, because that can be useful, even if it's a bit silly here. The meat is meant to be pork but could also be lamb, the bulk can be provided by mixed beans or chickpeas (those being really quite different things), and so on. At what point does a recipe become a list of suggestions?
I go with pork fillet, anyway, because I don't cook with pork all that often and it'll make a change. And I go with chickpeas because that's what I've got in the house. I love an easy decision!
And indeed, there's the cinnamon I anticipated - a teaspoon's worth, no less. Why isn't this called "Warming Winter Cinnamon Casserole", then?
Anyway, I digress. There's some quite interesting things in here - apricots, almonds, lots of parsley for some reason - and I'm actually looking forward to making it. Not least since the making is dead simple.
It starts with me browning the pork then setting it aside, softening a chopped onion in the same casserole dish, returning the pork to dish, and adding the "warming" elements - garlic, ginger, coriander, cinnamon and cumin, a predictable but welcome crew.
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| Appetisingly brown |
Once this is all mixed, I add the jar of drained chickpeas, a chopped red pepper, a good handful of roughly chopped dried apricots, and half a pint of chicken stock.
This is then brought to the boil, covered and simmered for 40 minutes. There's an instruction to add extra stock if it starts to look dry, but if anything there's a touch too much liquid even after the time is up.
That's not a problem, since the recipe calls for the casserole to be served with an unspecified quantity of brown basmati rice - so I'm free to interpret that as a liquid-absorbing "lots". Which I do.
First, though, the dish is finished off with a sprinkling-slash-stirring of toasted flaked almonds and chopped parsley.
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| Still really quite brown |
Now, look. A stew like this is never going to win any awards for presentation, not least when several of the ingredients inevitably conspire to make it look rather on the dull side. Serving it with specifically brown rice hardly helps either.
But it turns out to be perfectly timed for those cold nights drawing in, and - frankly - a minor triumph given how simple it is to put together. Nothing earth-shattering in the flavour department, you understand, but reasonably deep and interesting and with plenty of variety in each bite.
As Sam summarises, "It's more exotic than I expected from Good Housekeeping." A little unfair, perhaps, and yet...
File under: Might actually be one to repeat.
◘ THE DESSERT ◘
The book: Backen macht Freude (Dr. Oetker)
The recipe: p338, "Quarkstrudel" (erm, Quark Strudel, but you probably guessed that)
Yes! After a slow start, we're getting two months of German baking in a row. And this time it actually looks like something I might want to eat!
It might not be something I want to make, considering the process looks rather fiddly and extends over two pages. But if that's what the Random gods have decided for me, so be it.
Before that, however, my challenge is to locate the titular quark, that dairy product that's a bit yoghurt-y yet somehow also not. Asda claim to stock it online, but between me placing an order and that order reaching my front door, it gets substituted for Philadelphia cream cheese. Which, OK, not a million miles away, but not quite right for a sweet dessert either. Further local searches prove fruitless - neither M&S nor the Lewisham Food Centre, even with its million different types of Greek yoghurt, can help me here.
And so I resort to internet research. There are all kinds of opinions on what can be used instead of quark in a sweet baking context, but eventually I settle on skyr, that thick Icelandic dairy product that is readily available... at my local Asda. Full circle.
Fortunately, the rest of the ingredients are quite straightforward. I'm even able to find a (vegan, apparently) vanilla custard powder to replace the Dr. Oetker branded version that the recipe wants me to use, which is a nice touch. It's pretty much the one Dr. Oetker product I didn't think to order from the German Deli last time round...
Unlike last time, I don't have to look up any of the words in a dictionary to make sure I'm doing the right thing. However, I do have to check out a YouTube video to be sure that my interpretation of one of the instructions is in the right ballpark. Never let it be said that I'm not thorough.
First, though, some groundwork. A small tight ball of simple smooth dough is made from flour, egg, lukewarm water and oil. This is left in a warm place for 30 minutes. The recipe describes a convoluted method for achieving this - involving boiling water in a pan, then draining and drying the hot pan, lining it with baking paper, popping the dough in there and putting the lid on - but since I've got the heated clothes airer running anyway, I figure proximity to the radiating heat from that will have a similar effect.
Since the dough doesn't really rise at all during the 30 minutes, however - not that the recipe specifically says it's meant to, but I suppose there must be some reason for setting it aside - I now retrospectively wonder if that was the source of some of the problems I later encounter.
But again, if you're not going to actively tell me what should be happening during that time, it's not for me to guess whether I've gone wrong or not. This is a cookbook that comes with a "success guaranteed!" label on the front, after all. I have expectations.
Anyway, while that 30 minutes of nothing much is elapsing, I prepare the filling for the strudel. Contrary to the name, it's more than just quark. Indeed, I'd have called this "Apricot, Raisin and Quark Strudel", since that's what it mainly is. (Pity there's no cinnamon involved really.)
I start by softening some butter then slowly add sugar, a egg, some lemon juice, the quark yoghurt skyr, the vanilla custard powder and some whipping cream. I expect this to end up lumpy or in some way unappealing, but the result is essentially a slightly tarted-up yoghurt, really, and it's smooth enough without needing too much whisking. It's perhaps a little thicker than I anticipated (in a good way), but that's mainly because I didn't take the time to think about what the custard powder was likely to do to it. Duh.
Having also taken the time to drain and dice some tinned apricots, it's now time for me to work with the dough. What I hadn't fully realised before starting - and this is where YouTube comes in - is that this involves splitting it in two (yes, this recipe makes not one but two strudels), rolling each half out into a rectangle, then stretching it out to 30x40cm. As the video shows me, this is a bit like what pizza chefs do with pizza dough, only the result is super super thin - almost reminiscent of filo.
Now, you've read enough Random Kitchen to know that I'm definitely not going to be able to execute this with any degree of competence, and I'm fully aware of this too. But the fun is in the failure, so let's see how it goes, eh?
The recipe calls for a floured tea towel to be used here, because obviously that's a thing. That's not going to happen, not least since all we have is terry tea towels that would leave bits of fluff all over the dough. Instead, I do what I've learned to do when working with pepparkakor dough and use a sheet of baking paper (over a tea towel, still, as that part is going to come in handy later on).
This is what it looks like when I try to roll the first bit of dough into a rectangle:
And this is the result of the pizza stretch:
So yeah, that's gone as well as expected.
Still, I figure it's going to get rolled up and that might hide some of the worse failures of my stretching technique, so I plough on.
Of course, 30x40cm rectangles are a pipe dream at this stage. I now assume that's because the dough was supposed to rise somewhat in the proving, which it didn't, hence there being less volume to tease out in the first place.
Instead, these are the kind of dimensions I'm working with:
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| This is the other dough half; no, it's not much better, is it? |
...and if you're thinking that's likely to result in a flat and stodgy bake, (a) you've watched enough Bake Off to understand foreshadowing and (b) you're absolutely correct.
I mentioned filo earlier, and the next stage is indeed to brush my "dough" "rectangles" with melted butter:
Next, I spread the quark mixture over the surface then sprinkle it with apricots and raisins, leaving enough room to fold in the edges afterwards.
And then it's time for the part where the tea towels come in. Excitingly, I get to do that technique - also familiar from Bake Off - where you use the towel to roll up your bake, one turn at a time. Even more excitingly, this part of proceedings at least goes pretty well!
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| Midway through |
Satisfying and fun. What's not to like?
Now, with less dough to work with than I ought to have, my strudels are unlikely to look the part just yet (if ever). But at least there isn't quark filling seeping out of them like I'd feared when I saw those gaps in my rolled pastry.
I make sure they're well pinched together at the edges then lay them on a lined baking tray, seam down, and brush them with more of that melted butter before popping them in the oven to bake.
(Incidentally, the recipe wanted me to pre-heat the oven before starting to do any of this work with the dough. Good thing I ignored it - that's a lot of power to waste during an energy price crisis.)
Halfway through the bake, the strudels come out for some more buttering - and nope, they still don't look great...
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| ...at all |
The lack of consistency in strudel size is quite striking now. Even more striking is the fact that they're not rising at all. What with the dough issues, I suppose this shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but I might have expected at least some kind of lift between the pastry layers. Not necessarily to quite the extent shown in the recipe...
...but at least to more of an extent than, well, this:
Christ.
Oh well. I appear to have invented the strudel flatbread! That's fine too. At least a bit of icing sugar should hide some of my sins...
...or, as it transpires, massively accentuate them.
Man, this isn't going to be the world's best eat, is it? I already know what it's going to be like in the mouthfeel department - stodgy, basically - but I'm hoping the filling might be moist and tasty enough to rescue things a little.
And you know what? It actually does. A little. The fruit and dairy combination tastes good, with a bit of a tang to punch through the stodge, and substituting skyr for quark hasn't had any real adverse impact as far as I can tell. Even the barely risen dough is flavourful enough in itself - though the butter and icing sugar are doing some heavy lifting here, let's be honest. It's better with a little cream or even ice cream (come to think of it, why didn't I make up the rest of the packet of vanilla custard?!), but it stands fairly well on its own.
So, you know what, despite looking fairly fucking catastrophic, this isn't actually a total disaster. And hey - I've never made strudel before, the dough-stretching is more complex than I realised and you can't expect to get everything right on your first try. Plus I've learned how to do that cool rolling trick with a tea towel. Life skills!
Just, you know, a shame about the actual baked product.
File under: Surely too much effort to repeat.
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