AmiExpat

This week’s recipe was Rote Grütze.  I had trouble figuring out how to translate this, the closest I could come up with was red fruit jelly, but I’m sure there’s a better way to describe it.  And it seems I have bad timing.  This recipe requires sour cherries, red currants (rote Johannisbeeren) and raspberries.  When I got to the fruit stand downtown on Saturday, I found out that sour cherries aren’t ripe yet.  I remembered seeing sour cherries at the supermarket the week before, so I grabbed 300 g of sweet cherries, just in case, and we headed to the market.

It was a good thing I bought the sweet cherries because the packaged sour cherries at the market all had moldy bits that I could see down near the bottom of the packs (actually, it wouldn’t have mattered because there were sweet cherries there as well, but the ones I got from the fruit stand looked better).

I still don’t have a cherry pitter, so I did these by hand.  I tossed everything into a pot and boiled it with water.  In another pot, I made the vanilla sauce that we’ve made a couple times previously.

I thought I’d be cutting down on the sugar (from 4 to 3 tablespoons), since I was using sweet cherries instead of sour, but in the end, I used 5 tablespoons of sugar.  The vanilla sauce turned out a little lumpy, like before, but I didn’t bother sieving it this time, I just wasn’t in the mood to do anything more in the kitchen, especially after sieving the fruit.

Oliver and Rainer devoured their Rote Grütze.  Actually, at first, Rainer found the cinnamon overwhelming and thought it was way too much, but then decided it was really good and went back for a second bowl.  I thought the dish was still a little sour.  I could have gone back and poured a little more vanilla sauce on it, but I was feeling lazy so just ate it as it was.

I ‘d say this recipe was just okay.  Rainer says it’s near the median for the recipes we’ve tried (most of which have been excellent, so that’s not saying this is a bad dish).  When I’ve had Rote Grütze in the past, it was more chunky and I found the smooth consistency of this version a little disappointing.  I think if I made it again (Rainer has suggested that I do), I would add some more whole fruit in to make it chunkier, whether that’s more cherries or another fruit.  I also had a handful of Heidelbeeren (bilberries) leftover and tossed those into the pot with the rest of the fruit.

This dish is very flexible, and you can use whatever red berries you have available.  You can also add boisenberries and black currants.  I’ve even seen other colors of Grütze on offer, so you can do a yellow Grütze too (that version had peaches along with some light colored berries).

Other participants:

• Stephanie at A Greenville Life

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This week’s recipe was Scheiterhaufen, an apple-bread casserole from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern section of the book.  It is just Brötchen (large German rolls), cut in half, soaked in an egg-milk mixture, then layered with grated apple and raisins.  Scheiterhaufen is German for the pile of wood used in burning people at the stake.  I have no idea why this dish is called Scheiterhaufen, I did a quick internet search (“Warum heisst Scheiterhaufen Scheiterhaufen?”) but didn’t come up with anything that really explained it.

It was really easy to make (I grated the apples - I used Granny Smith - using a […] Continue Reading…

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