As you may know if you follow me steadily I love mixing different cooking cultures, using different spices not common in Italian cooking.
This way to interpret food comes from my university years in Rimini: I used to live with a lot of people from different places from guys from South of Italy to frieds from England, Greece and even a boy half Venezuelan half from Sicily.
Meal time was a funny mix of dolmades, tagliatelle and Marmite.
My personal battle with raising dough goes on.
I’m never fully pleased about how they turn out, no matter if I use sourdough or yeast; maybe I’m too strict with myself, maybe I just have to keep on trying to have better results.
The mini buns you see here are undoubtedly great, they are a recipe from Gino Fabbri, pastry master and president of the Club de la Coupe du Monde de la Patisserie; I’ve just changed size and the shaping method.
My son Lorenzo is victim of chicken pox; of course everything started on Thursday so we are forced to a long week end closed at home.
Now it’s Sunday and I think the sickness is at its peak: since this morning he’s crying hard because red spots itch and burn, yesterday evening he got 102°F; seeing him like this is a real pain.
We are grateful I reached the vaccination before getting sick or it would be a big trouble.
I’m so happy about this post, I wish to put this recipe that comes from mum’s scraps on blog since I’ve closed the old one but every time I make them I can’t fix them in a photo.
They ended before the photo or I simply didn’t have time, the day was too dark to shoot or pictures were too awful to be posted.
This time here we are, this time I can post the recipe of these biscuits instead of sending it via email, on slips of papers, Facebook chats.
It’s three years in a row I’m bringing them to school Christmas and summer parties and they are a must among friends and relatives.
| Servings |
10
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Ingredients
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You can store them in a tin box for 5-6 days.
I give myself the chance to bake something last week end: my sourdough Brienne was alone in the fridge for too long.
I was craving not pizza or bread but something easy and that could last few days: I was procastinating brezel for a long time, I found a recipe with sourdough so I just needed a helpful hand.
Luckly Lorenzo was home and willing to help.
Brezels ( or prezels, it depends on the region) are a kind of bread someone leads back to monks in France and North of Italy whom, with dough leftovers, made small treats the shape of hands joined to pray for children who learn by heart part of the Bible or prayers.
The shiny dark colour of brezel is their distinctive trait and it’s reached with a boiling process called Laugengebäck in German.
The boiling happens in a solution of water and lye, in countries where brezels are common you can buy lye cubes at chemist’s but here they aren’t plus lye is quite dangerous especially if you have an helping child around so in this recipe you will find instructions to boil brezels into a solution of water, baking soda and cooking salt.
The result will be not as shiny and dark as with lye but the taste is great.
After all this I have to say one more thing about brezel: I had to do them.
I really had to do them because when I was in Munich in October with my sister and my best friend I wandered about for three days looking for a cloth or tea towel or napking with blue and white squares, emblem of Bavaria for my photo sets and they wandered about with me.
I only find the right napking ( not too shiny, not with too big squares…) the last day, we really looked for it everywhere and now I really had to make a Bavaria dish and to take pictures with that napkin!
Isn’t it great? Say yes please!
| Servings |
7
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Ingredients
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