BBA Challenge #36: Stollen

It now seems like a lifetime ago.

I used to live in Brooklyn. Why there, and not Manhattan? The simplest and foremost reason was the sky. I grew up in California where you have nothing but sky. The highest buildings in my area were about two-stories high, and even then, they were a rarity. So Brooklyn was an obvious choice. Most buildings weren't over four stories and the sky- oh, the sky.

Much to my chagrin, though, most people I knew who lived in Manhattan would very rarely come to Brooklyn. When I would throw parties, they would sort of look at me funny like "You expect me to go where?" and then confess that they had been to Brooklyn only once or twice. Me, on the other hand, I preferred to stay in Brooklyn, and would try, as much as I could, to spend time all my there. My favorite bars were in Brooklyn and I just loved the way it looked. Though I have to confess that I did do most of my food shopping at the Union Square Farmer's Market and Whole Foods in Union Square. Chalk it up to convenience.

Still, I was always on the lookout for shops to visit, and without the infrastructure of Twitter and food blogs- which I never knew existed until I found The Smitten Kitchen- I had to pretty much hear of them through word-of-mouth or random walking.

I don't remember how I discovered Schaller und Weber on the Upper East Side. Perhaps I was visiting my only friend that lived up there, or maybe I just stumbled up on it on the crazy mammoth walks I would undertake just to look at the different architecture. I once walked about 12 miles through three boroughs, just for fun. My favorite thing to do while visiting said friend was to pop into Schaller und Weber and just inhale the smell of the sausages. I know, I know, being a vegetarian and all, what was I thinking? But I just loved the way the place smelled, all meaty and salty and cured.

The thing I most remember about the store was looking at the strange products in German, before I could read and write it. Mustards and Tomato Paste in tubes, strange boxes full of potato powder ready to be made into Kartoffelklöße. Well, the same things that you can get in any good supermarket here.

One cold January morning, I picked up something heavy. It was Stollen, and a kilo of it, at that, all wrapped in a plastic bag with a best by date of March. I don't remember where I had heard of Stollen before, but I seemed to have seen it somewhere before. I picked it up, put it in the basket along with various mustards and German candy.


As part of the Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge as hosted by the lovely Nicole of Pinch My Salt, stollen would be showing up on the schedule sometime after Christmas, which is a bit funny because most Germans avoid Stollen anyhow, so I thought I'd have a tough time trying to get rid of it.

Here's the mise en place. Just in case you're wondering, I did the same as with the Panettone and soaked the candied fruit in some Macallan single malt Scotch. It was amazing in that, so I decided to do it again.


Once again, the Electrolux Assistent comes to the rescue. I wish I could make a video of how it works just to show people how amazing this thing really is.


Here's the mixture with the almonds and the fruit included.


And as a ball together. The dough was pretty wet on this one for some reason. Perhaps I didn't mix it enough before I added the rest of the bits.


After the first rise, it's not as pillowy as the Panettone, but it's still on this side of firm.


I rolled it out into a rough rectangle. Rough here being a very key word.


Sprinkled the almonds. Actually, I wanted to spread some marzipan in the middle just like the Marzipan Stollen you get here.


I folded it over and...


Um. No, wait. I folded it over and folded the other part over. Somehow I got really confused with the shaping, wanting to make it like the ones here. The funny thing is that many recipes I've found here call for a Stollen pan in order to make that perfect Stollen.


I did no such thing, but thought it came out pretty good.


I sort of winged it with the almonds and just stuffed them into the "mouth" of the Stollen.

Now, you might ask when exactly I made the Stollen. Well, it was three months ago in March. Some friends had been trying to pin us down for the Christmas get-together we never had, and, well, Stollen had been the next bread in the book so it all worked perfectly to plan.


Or, it would have. Somehow in my haste and in trying to get ready to leave the house I sort of... burnt it. Not wanting to trash it and not wanting to re-do the Stollen, I decided to do something I thought I'd never do.


Once we got to the party, I decided to cut off the bad parts of the Stollen and move forward.


I decorated it with powdered sugar and brought it out. The thing is that the Stollen was so delicious, I couldn't help but shave off slices. Among the four of us, we polished off half of the thing. I cut half of what remained and left it there.


One of the things you can do with Stollen is to leave it out for weeks to dry it out. Unfortunately for this one. It didn't even last another day. It was that good.

Just for comparison, though. I'm very much used to Stollen that is pretty dry. When the first ones start appearing in early October, I usually buy a mini-Stollen- for the sake of research, of course. They're pretty dry, but not dry enough that a glass of milk can't make it better. As the season progresses, I get to sample all kinds of Stollen. But once Christmas is over, it's gone. As though they know they won't be able to move the loaves of sugary coated goodness once the holiday season is over.

Most people I know here hate Stollen. I have no idea why. Though, if you look at the Christmas Bread situation in the States it's no better: Fruitcake. We once received one and it was awful. All candied fruit and dense. I vowed never to touch it again. But something dawned on me when eating a similar and very small loaf of fruit bread here. Fruitcake, the kind you get in the US would be so much better swimming in some kind of scotch or rum. I can just imagine it now.

Other Stollen Bakers include:

Phyl from Of Cabbages and King Cakes

Sally from Bewitching Kitchen

ap269 from Family and Food

Oggi from I can do that!

BBA Challenge #23: Pane Siciliano and Beatrice

There's this word in German, lassen. You may recognize it from its similarity to laissez in the word laissez faire, which, incidentally, comes from the French, and in turn, probably from some old Latin word. So, the word is usually used in the sense of when you have someone else do something for you. When you say Ich habe das backen lassen, you are saying "I had that baked". When you say Ich habe das gebacken, then you're saying "I baked that".

So sometimes bread just goes automatically. I keep saying that bread is really forgiving when I really mean that dough is really forgiving. I've kept batches of dough around in the fridge and by the seventh day, they were just as fine. Okay, maybe they weren't optimal, and maybe it's not the best bread I could have baked, but it still rose and allowed itself to be baked.

When I just go on auto pilot, the results can be- well- great! And there is no easier way to go on auto-pilot than with bread that you don't have to babysit.

Pane Siciliano, the twenty-third bread in the challenge is a three-day bread. While some may groan and think that Peter Reinhart has lost his marbles, the three days are justified, though it might be better to make it a two-day bread and start early on the morning of the second in order to finish that night.

For this bread, I was baking with two-ingredients which are difficult to get in Germany. Elite Weizen is the high-gluten flour from the local specialty flour store, and Semolina rimancinata di Grano Duro, which I could not find anywhere. I ended up taking a trip to KaDeWe- Kaufhaus des Westens, or Department Store of the West. There are quite a number of places to go for specialty food in Berlin. If I had been thinking, I could have gone to Mitte Meer near the Hauptbahnhof, and checked out their selection of Mediterranean goods. But no! I opted for convenience, as KaDeWe is only a ten minute bus ride from my apartment.

KaDeWe is a huge department store that begins the Ku'damm one of the busiest shopping streets in Berlin. Though, technically, it is on Tauentzienstrasse, this street turns into the Kurfürstendamm, so all shops on this long street are generally understood to be on the Ku'damm. If you've ever been to Harrod's in London or Galeries Lafayette in Paris, then you can probably picture KaDeWe.

On the top floor they have a food hall, where you can find all sorts of food from around the globe. Their selection of goods from the US is also quite extensive, not to mention, expensive. They have Root Beer for about 2€ per can, as well as Jiffy Pop and that BBQ sauce with the guy screaming on the label. Oh, they also have canned pumpkin, but at 7€ per can, I think I'll make my own again this year.

As is the case, the kitchen is mad busy on the weekend, so I occasionally have to make room for other projects while I'm baking. In this case, I was waiting for the pâte fermentée to wake up and de-chill. I stacked all the ingredients to get them out of the way. From the bottom on the left, Semolina, flour, salt, yeast, and on top, the honey and oil mixture. You don't actually mix the honey and oil for any particular reason- I just poured them into the same container because it was more convenient for me. Though I could have just as well poured them in with the water on the right.

After some kneading in the trusty ol' DLX, the dough was ready for rising.

I plopped it into the bowl, covered it with plastic wrap and zoned out into automatic land.

I should interject here and say that I am a notoriously bad shopper when it comes to clothing. Usually if I find something I like, I will resolve to buy two in anticipation of the day the first gets worn out or damaged or starts to look ratty. Of course, this never happens. And so, I end up looking like a bum that other bums don't want to hang around with. I don't want to shatter your impression of me as a dapper young gentleman who runs around in button down shirts and a monocle, but it's true. I hate buying clothes.

So, I reluctantly went pants shopping. And after much to-do and trying on of pants-that-no-respectable-person-would-wear-but-I-had-to-because-I-don't-know-my-size-in-German-measurements-and-of-course-they-don't-go-by-inches-but-also-not-by-centimeters, I bought three pair. We were out of the house for three hours and not once did I think about the dough. Until we got home and jumped like a madman to the rescue of the dough.

I poured it out and began to shape it. There it is, a 60cm baguette in all its deformed glory.

German sheet pans are actually very odd. They are all designed to fit the slots in the oven, but are not designed for air circulation. Perhaps for this reason, almost all new ovens here switch from conventional to convection at the touch of a button. Of course, our stove is a plain electric stove that looks like it was purchased when the Wall fell.

However, this particular sheet pan fits perfectly on a shelf in my refrigerator, with nary a centimeter to spare. So, this is the sheet of choice when I have to put something in the fridge. It's actually mighty convenient for bagels.

The next day, I woke up to find the dough quite puffy. I had a nature hike, so I woke up particularly early to get the bread done before I left. Note that I actually had to separate some of the loaves. I did this very gently by taking a pair of scissors to the parchment paper where the dough stuck and then very very gently prying the loaves apart. I wanted to slide parchment paper under the whole thing, but worried that it would disturb the loaves too much, so I decided to take my chances with stuck bread and went ahead and baked them.

The loaves came out golden with a crispy, chewy crust, and oh so puffy in the middle.

The crumb was beautiful. I wasn't expecting huge holes, but the crumb was still amazing. irregular holes and golden-tinted.

We had this bread for Sunday Dinner (just before Tatort) with a mushroom stew from the French cookbook I Know How To Cook. It was a little bit too much mushroom, plus I added onions, which weren't in the original recipe, so It was a bit too weird, even for me.

As a bonus, I would like to introduce the first breads from my first self-birthed sourdough starter, Beatrice. This first loaf was made Thursday night before even starting the Panettone. I did an overnight bulk rise and baked it in the morning. At first, I thought I would get no oven rise, but the thing just leaped up as soon as it hit the hot air of the oven.

The second loaf from Beatrice was this fruit and walnuts loaf which took forever to bake- partly because I baked it in a springform pan. It was, however, quite yummy. Unfortunately, I didn't write down the recipe, but it's basically raisins, dried cranberries, dried sour cherries and walnuts along with whole wheat and Type 812 flours. Maybe next time I'll write a post about breads of my own creation. Or maybe I'll bake my way through another bread book like Leader's Local Breads and start my own challenge. You never know.

Other beautiful Pane Sicilianos include:

Anne Marie from Rosemary and Garlic

Mags from The Other Side of Fifty

Carolyn from Two Skinny Jenkins

Paul from Yumarama