The recipes in the Real German Cuisine Challenge are from the German recipe book Die echte deutsche Küche and will be translated by me over the next couple of years.
Grumbeersupp mit Quetschkuche (Potato soup with plum cake)
Potato soup with Zwetschgen cake
Ingredients for 6 portions:
For the cake:
- 400g (14 oz) flour
- 1/2 yeast cube (about 20g/0.7 oz)
- 50g (1.75 oz) sugar
- 200 ml lukewarm milk
- 1 egg
- 1 pinch salt
- 50g (1.75oz) softened butter
- 1.8 kg (4 lbs) Zwetschgen (prune plums)
- butter for the sheet pan
- 2 T sugar for sprinkling
For the soup:
- 1/2 small celery root
- 1 small leek
- 2 carrots
- 2 parsley roots
- 1 T butter
- 1 onion
- 1 1/2 liter beef broth
- 500g (17.6 oz) potatoes (Grumbeere, mehligkochende/floury sort)
- 1 bacon rind
- 1/2 tsp dried marjoram
- salt
- fresh ground black pepper
- fresh grated nutmeg
- 100g (3.5 oz) cream
- 1 bunch of chives
Preparation time: about 1 1/2 hours
Per portion: 710 calories
Directions:
- For the cake, place the flour in a bowl, make a depression in the center. Stir the yeast with 1 tsp sugar and 3-4 T milk until dissolved, place in the depression and sprinkle with flour. Cover and leave in a warm spot.
- Wash the Zwetschgen, cut open the long way and remove the pit. Press together again and once slice once more the long way, so the fruit is quartered longways.
- Add the egg, a pinch of salt, the rest of the milk and the butter to the bowl with the flour and mix everything well. Knead till a smooth dough forms and cover again and leave for 20 minutes. Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F).
- For the soup, wash and clean or peel the celery, leek, carrots, and parsley root, then cut them all in small cubes. Peel and chop the onion. In a large pot, melt the butter, and sweat the onion and vegetables. Add the broth and bring to a boil.
- Roll out the dough on a floured surface. Place on a buttered and floured baking sheet, rolling up the edges slightly to make a rim. Distribute the plums on the dough. Bake for about 30 minutes.
- Wash and peel the potatoes and cut into approx. 1 cm large cubes. Add the potatoes, bacon rind, and spices to the vegetable and broth mix and simmer for about 20 minutes, until the potatoes are soft.
- Remove the finished cake from the oven and sprinkle with sugar.
- Wash the chives and cut into very small slices. Puree the soup, add the cream, and bring once more to a boil. Taste and add more salt, pepper and nutmeg if needed. Stir in the chives. Serve the potato soup with fresh Zwetschgen cake.
- Tip: Cut some of the fresh vegetables in fine slices and add to the soup at the end just before bringing to a final boil.
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Hi again,
so here’s the recipe anyway
Pflaumenkuchen (also Zwetschgenkuchen)
For a big baking tray (= Backblech or Blech), which has roughly the size of 35 cm x 40 cm you need 0.5 kg of flour (normal white wheat flour), one package of fresh yeast, some warm milk, some sugar, a package of breadcrumbs (Weckmehl or Semmelbrösel), cinnamon (powder) and a bit of sunflower or olive oil and of course lots of ripe, fresh plums or damson plums. A tray of cake is enough to go with a 4-person lunch or dinner, and it’s no problem making too much, because it keeps well.
You put the fresh yeast into a cup with some sugar (a teaspoon full), stir the mass until it becomes fluid and let it rise a little. Put the flour into a large bowl, add the yeast-sugar mixture and some warm milk (not too much) and start to knead the mixture until you get a smooth dough. Add as much milk as necessary to collect up all flour, but not so much as to turn it into a runny or glutinous thing. You can also add about 1 tablespoon full of sugar to the dough to sweeten it a bit. It is ready when it drops away from the walls of the bowl and into a ball on its own. Let it rise until it is roughly double its size and fills the bowl.
After that roll or push it out flat onto the baking tray, which you thinly coated with some oil first. You can use butter instead of oil, but oil gives the better crust. Create a rim where the dough meets the rim of the tray. Now allow the dough to rise again until it is about 1.5 cm high. Mix the package of breadcrumbs with sugar and cinnamon and spread the mixture about 0.5 cm high on the dough. It can be sugary allright, but you ought to still taste it’s mainly breadcrumbs.
The ripe plums are halved lengthwise, the stones taken out. The ideal stage of ripeness is a sweet fruit, but not yet so ripe as to not hold shape. You will need enough plum halves to fit the whole baking tray if they are placed upright into the dough! You stack the plum halves on end into the dough, in rows supporting each other, with large plums you can stack them on their sides (of the oval), with smaller plums you stack them standing on their ends. Each row overlaps the meeting of two plums like scales on a fish. The one major mistake you can make here is to not really place plums in an upright manner. The cake needs to be crammed with the maximum amount of fruit possible
. The finished cake needs to be tart, juicy AND sweet (but really, truly not too sweet!!! Definitely not US-style sweet). With roughly 125 g of butter, sugar, cinnamon powder and 2 tablespoons of flour, which you stir and crumble in a small bowl, until you get lots small crumbles/streusel, you sprinkle a thin layer of sweet crumble on the whole cake. Let the whole rise a bit again.
Put all in the oven for about 45 minutes at 180 degrees C into the middle baking area of your oven. Check frequently, it largely depends on your oven how long it takes to finish. The dough should be baked crisp, not too hard, certainly not a deep brown, but also not too lightly, because it needs to withstand the juice from the plums. It is eaten held in your hands, so a give in the finished product is absolutely okay, but the juice must not soak through the bottom. Take out of the oven and place in the fridge until it’s cooled down to fridge temperature.
The cake is served in rectangles roughly 15 x 10 cm in size.
Kartoffelsuppe (Grumbieresupp)
You need middlingly starchy potatos (mittelweich kochend), carrots, a bunch of root vegetables (1 Bund Wurzel/Suppengemüse) or just a small bit of a knob of celeriac (about 1/8th), 3 small or 2 big leek stalks, a small bunch of parsley, 2 packages/containers of Schmand (heavy sour cream) or sour cream, salt, ground black pepper and marjoram (dried or fresh), some sunflower or olive oil.
The amounts depend on how much soup you wish to make and how much carrots you like in your soup. The usual split for us is 4 parts potato to 1 part of carrot, but 5:1 or 6:1 is also ok. The consistency of the end result is a thickly chunky soup with even distribution of chunks to fluid, slightly more on the chunks side. It’s definitely not a few chunks of veggies swimming in a mass of fluid
.
The potatos and carrots are peeled and cut up into thumbsized chunks for the potatos and about 0.5 cm thick horizontal rings of carrots, you put them into water (just covering the whole mass) and stew them until they are halfway done. The leek stalks are cleaned and cut up into rings roughly 1.5 cm thick, the bit of celeriac is cut into cubes about 1cm on each side. When the potatos and carrots are half done you add the leeks and celeriac, the two containers of Schmand, finely cut up parsley, maybe a bit more water (probably not necessary if you cooked it with a lid) and you add salt, black pepper, a bit of oil (a tablespoon or two) and a sizable amount of marjoram (more than a sprinkle, but not so much as to make the spice overpowering) and continue simmering until the veggies are all done. The end product should be hearty and spicy, definitely tasting somewhat salty too. It must not be bland or sweetish (which can happen with too little spice and salt)!
The soup is served quite hot and steamy, you eat the soup together with the cold plum cake in your left hand, a bite of cake, a spoon of soup. It’s an all-time fav for loads of Southern German families and a typical late summer/early fall dish, eaten most often in the regions of Baden and Palatinate and up the Rhine to the Alemannic regions near Freiburg.
The cake btw can also be served as a dessert to other meals or as cake for sunday coffee topped with lots of whipped cream.
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