Category Archives: regional breads

February 26th, 2017

Ausgezogne

Category Cake & Pastry, regional breads Tags: fried, only with yeast, Pâte fermentée 16 Responses

The Ausgezogne is a south german deep fried cake which is similar to a doughnut but instead of a hole there is a very thin dough layer in the middle. Sometime this cake is called Knieküchlein (literally knee cake), too as the thin dough layer can be archived by stretching the dough over the knee. But it can be stretched by hand, too, and is very similar to forming pizza dough.

To get a good stretchable dough it is important to develop the gluten network fully. To support the gluten development a pâte fermentée is added to the rather soft dough. This makes it easy to form the Ausgezogne dircetly before frying. The thin part gets crisp while the outer rim is soft and fluffy. And this contrast is typical for the little cake and makes it so delicious!

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February 17th, 2017

Rhenish Blackbread

Category Bread, regional breads Tags: regional, regionale Brotsorten, Rübenkraut, Rye, Sourdough 47 Responses

The grandmother of my dearest complained that today you can not get real blackbread anymore. The “modern” one is to moist in her opinion. When I asked how a “real” blackbread should be, she answered: “Just like it once had been”. My argument that I do not know how the bread looked like ninety years back in the past just gained me a critical gaze. But at the end I could get some informations about her childhoods blackbread from her: moist, but not so moist we today, dark and baked with rather fine cracked rye. And my ambitions was aroused to recreate this bread for her.

And so I bake a blackbread with the classical way: sourdough made with fine cracked rye, a soaker with roasted bread crumbs and coarse cracked rye and a good portion molasse. I added a bit of dark roasted rye malt to enhance the deep malt flavour. I baked it in the middle of the week when we spent some days with our Gran. And when we cut the bread the next day, everyone was happy, even Gran liked the bread!

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February 11th, 2017

Pottweck

Category Bread, regional breads Tags: Butter, Buttermilch, only with yeast, Pâte fermentée, regional, regionale Brotsorten, Sahne 24 Responses

A small part of a comment caught my attention: the word “Pottweck”. I asked for a description and got a very detailed explanation from Jürgen. Nicole added some other details and so I was straight on my way to the kitchen. They explained to me that the Pottweck is a regional speciality from the area lower rhine. Its name stems from the way it is baked: in a pot (= Pott in the dialect). And the pot gives the bread its typical mushroom shape, too, as the bread rise highly over the pot.

For the ingredients both were united at the buttermilk as liquid, while they differed at the used fat – it seems that either butter, butter plus some lard or only margarine can be used. I stayed with the butter for the beginning, but it is easy to swap part of it with lard or replace it completely with margarine. To increase flavour complexity and to enlarge shelf life I added a pâte fermentée to the formula as well as a little (untypical) addition of cream. And as my old black enamel pot is a bigger one, I knew from beginning that it had to be one big bread.

To watch the bread while baking was pure fun. It rose higher and higher. It was hard to let it cool and wait to for the photos before tasting the bread. But then we had the fresh bread for breakfast and where extremly happy with the slight sourness and complex flavour! A delicious treat on Saturday morning!

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December 3rd, 2016

Anisbrezen

Category regional breads, Rolls Tags: Anis, regional, regionale Brotsorten 11 Responses

When I was researching another recipe, I stumbled upon the recipe for anise pretzels . These pretzles are made without lye and are typically served during winter in the region Upper Franconia. They contain a lot of anise, as their name promise.

Interestingly it seems that the recipe vary from town to town: In Weidenberg the dough is made without the addition of fat, while in a recipe from Bayreuth the dough is enriched with some milk and butter. I liked the richer variant more and so my dough contains both milk and butter, too. A egg yolk is added as emulsifier and helps to create fluffy and soft crumb.

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November 15th, 2016

Röggelchen

Category regional breads, Rolls Tags: Malz, regional, regionale Brotsorten, Rye, Sourdough 20 Responses

In the cologne pubs (called “Brauhaus”) exists a dish with confuse tourists regulary. It is called “Halve Hahn” and the tourists translate this with “half rooster” and expect to get a half roasted chicken when they order it. What they get is one half of twin-roll together with old gouda cheeses, mustard and some onions. There are many theories to explain the name of the dish – one is that once upon time someone asked in the cologne dialect if he could get on half of the roll: “Ääver isch will doch bloß ne halve han” (But I want just one half).

The roll that comes with the dish is called “Röggelchen” (little rye) and is baked as twin roll. You can tell in which city the roll was baked by the way it was formed: The Röggelchen from Düsseldorf has a round shape while the Cologne one’s shape is long. Both in common is that they are made partly with rye. In this variant the rye is used to make a sourdough, which adds complex flavour notes to the rolls. Another typical characteristic is the dark, shining crust which is due to a glazing which is made with roasted starch and applied before and after baking.

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October 23rd, 2016

Oberländer Bread

Category Bread, regional breads Tags: regionale Brotsorten, Rye, Sourdough, Wheat 88 Responses

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 16th, 2016

Kürbisstuten

Category Bread, regional breads Tags: Biga, Herbst, Kürbis 30 Responses

In 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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September 30th, 2016

East Frisian Black Bread with Sunflower Seeds

Category Bread, regional breads Tags: regional, regionale Brotsorten, Rye, Schwarzmarkt, Sonnenblumenkerne, Sourdough 144 Responses

The very first suggestion I got for the post series “regional bread” was East Frisian Black Bread. As I already wrote a recipe for the magazine “Ö” I needed another variant – and decided to create a new recipe using sun flower seeds and coarse rye in a soaker. A bigger batch of sugar beet syrup makes the crumb darker and adds a subtle sweetness to the sour flavour notes from the sourdough.

It is a very aromatic black bread, and the soaker helps to create a moist crumb. Cut in slices and wrapped in paper I took it with me to the food swap “Schwarzmarkt” in cologne. A attentive reader maybe already noticed that I used the food swap to bake a big batch of different rye breads. It was a good opportunity to bake a lot of rye breads without suffering from my sensibility to rye. and to provide you, my dear reader, a new batch of rye recipes. This is for me another advantage of this great Swap.

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September 25th, 2016

Onjeschwedde

Category Bread, regional breads Tags: Korinthen, regional, regionale Brotsorten, Schwarzmarkt 26 Responses

I’m totally thrilled about all the little jewels I meet in range of my “regional bread” series. From Annette I got describtion of the Bread Onjeschwedde, which is a raisin bread speciality of Rheydt – a part of Mönchengladbach. It is baked with the loaves touching each other a methode which keeps the bread very soft and moist. Before baking it is slashed with a curved long cut and some small cuts on the sides. The so called “Rheydter Flower”.

The name “onjeschwedde” means literally “not sweated” and means that the bread is made with “green” flour – freshly milled flour of newly harvest grains. This flour contains more moisture then a ripened flour which looses the moisture – it sweats! As it was just harvest time, so I called my local mill and ask. And indeed they promised me fresh flour for September.

The second special thing about this bread is that it is made with a huge amount of rye – 40% to be precise. It is the first sweet bread I met with this high amount rye! And so I used sourdough as preferment, which adds a deepness to its aroma, rounded by a faint cinnamon flavour. Sweetness comes from a bit of sugar and currants. The taste is something special, a sweet bread but with its very own, distinct flavour. A great bread which needs nothing more then a bit of butter!

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September 18th, 2016

Rheinisches Krustenbrot

Category Bread, regional breads Tags: regional, regionale Brotsorten, Rye, Sourdough, Wheat 43 Responses

The second bread for my regional bread collection is one I know well: a crusty bread from the rhineland, called “Rheinisches Krustenbrot”.

These crusty breads you can find in different parts of Germany and they vary in the amount of rye which is added to the dough. I know it as a mild bread with only 10% rye flour added. It is baked with seamside up which creates the typical rustic look of this bread. It has a light, fluffy crumb and – as the name suggested – a thick, crunchy crust.

I baked my version of this bread using two different sourdoughs: A rye sourdough which adds a hearty note to the flavour and which contains all of the rye in the formula, and a mild wheat sourdough which adds a joghurt like note to the taste of the bread.

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