Tandem Afternoon - Topic: German/Austrian Cooking

Hyvää päivä!

Yesterday we had our second meeting with our "Finnish-German Tandem". Paul and I decided to cook some German and Austrian specialties. Paul made some "Reibekuchen" and I made "Apfelmus" and "Salzburger Nockerl".

Recipe for Reibekuchen

5 lbs white potatoes
4 medium yellow onions
4 eggs
1 Tbsp salt, or to taste
sunflower oil or other neutral oil for frying

Coarsely grate potatoes and onions (a food processor saves a great deal of time).
Salt the potato mixture to taste.
Drain salted grated potatoes and onions in a sieve or colander, trying to reserve as much potato starch as possible. Discard liquid.
Mix in eggs.
Pour in just enough oil to cover the bottom of a nonstick frying pan.
Place the pan over medium-high heat. When the oil is hot, drop heaping tablespoonfuls of the potato mixture into the pan and flatten.
Cook until golden-brown, approximately 3 minutes, depending on the stove. Flip and cook until the other side is also browned and crisp.
Drain on a paper towel covered plate and keep warm in the oven.
Replenish oil and repeat until all the batter is gone. Avoid using any liquid that accumulates in the bottom of the bowl.
Serve with applesauce, sour cream, or smoked salmon.

Applesauce recipe:

Apples (how much you want or need)
Cinnamon and sugar

1. peel the apples and cut them into four pieces, remove the core.
2. put some water and the apple pieces into a pan and cook them 'till they are soft.
3. crunch them
4. put cinnamon and sugar to the crunched apples and mix it.
Decide yourself how much you wanna put in, start with less and put more if needed.

Salzburger Nockerln:

There are a lot of different recipes for those, i put you one for example.

serves 4 as dessert
• 5 eggs
• ½ cup milk
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 tablespoon Butter
• Vanilla aroma
• grated skin of ½ lemon
• less than a pinch of salt
• icing sugar

Preheat oven to 245°C or 470°F.

Divide the eggs into yolks and whites and beat the egg whites with salt and little sugar for one minute. Add rest of sugar and beat egg whites until stiff.

Put the egg yolks into a mixing bowl and add ¼ of the stiffly beaten egg whites. With a whisk mix this quite well. Add rest of egg whites, sieved flour, Vanilla and lemon skin and carefully mix this, fold it in more than mixing it.

You need a heat proofed dish in which you put in the butter and milk and let this come to a boil. Spoon 3 or 4 big dumplings onto the hot milk-butter and put it into the oven.

Bake until golden brown, this takes not more than five minutes. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve immediately.

Ok, some of you maybe already have experienced the difficulty of Salzburger Nockerl ;)
I never did it before, so i was not expecting anything *gg*. At the end it didn't look like Salzburger Nockerl, but it was ok to eat ;)
I will give it another try soon.

The Reibekuchen and the Apfelmus was very good and only Niko and Paul had some accident with the muller (?), they needed some plaster to stop the bleeding *gg*. I think they just did it, so that i have to do all the washing afterwards, grrr.

At the end all of us were leaving with a full stomack. We are looking forward to our Finnish cooking evening, hopefully i will stay alive :)

The days before there was nothing special to report, just trying to do some useful stuff for the university, more or less with success.
I've also learned the Finnish expression for "2 left handed", but i don't remember, i will post it later.

Update: I have now the Finnish phrase, it is "peukalo keskellä kämmentä". In English it means something like "thumb in the middle of the hand" and in German as whole sentence it is "Jemand hat einen Daumen in der Mitte der Handfläche". *gg*

Nähdään !