Month: October 2021

Around the world in 80 bakes, no.71: Westfälischer Pumpernickel from Germany

Around the world in 80 bakes, no.71: Westfälischer Pumpernickel from Germany

We’re now into the last ten bakes in this series, and I’m going to stop insisting on a different country for each bake: rather, I’m going to revisit some of the countries we’ve already looked at where we’ve missed recipes that seem so important that it seem crazy to leave them out just because I’ve included another bake from that country. Phileas Fogg might object.

I’m going to start with Germany and the darkest, blackest rye bread called Pumpernickel, and more particularly with the original version from Westphalia (“Westfälischer Pumpernickel” in German), which has a baking time of 24 hours, the longest of any bread I know. The idea is that the very slow, low temperature bake imparts a particular colour and flavour to the bread in a way that you just don’t get by adding colouring agents, even natural ones like malt extract or molasses. The resulting bread, sliced thinly, is the best thing in the world to accompany dishes like smoked salmon or gravadlax.

 The long baking time makes this version impractical for many commercial bakeries, so many other processes get used, usually going for a higher temperature, shorter bake, and often adding some plain wheat flour to the rye in order to get some gluten structure. The version I’ve done is certainly tricky to handle – I haven’t got it 100% right on this first try (I’ll explain what needs to be done differently) but I think this is going to be a bread that I revisit many times.

I went for an amalgam of various German recipes (most notably this one) and the instructions in Andrew Whitley’s Bread Matters.

The first key to pumpernickel is the use very coarse, dark rye flour. This is something you can’t necessarily get in the shops, so I’ve started with rye flakes and run them through the food processor. I did this fairly lightly, resulting in a loaf with a very grainy structure that the Germans would call “Vollkornbrot”. I love it – you may wish to grind down the rye flakes or grains rather more than I did. I also added some sunflower seeds, which one sees in several German recipes.

You’ll need a sourdough starter, home made or bought. My regular sourdough starter is made purely with dark rye flour: I use 90g at a time and replenish with 30g flour and 60g water. You will probably have your own version.

This isn’t a labour-intensive bake, but it takes a long time: you need to start around three days before you intend to eat the bread.

Day 1: production sourdough mix and main seed mix

  • 90g dark rye sourdough starter
  • 90g dark rye flour
  • 180g cold or tepid water
  • 350g rye flakes
  • 100g sunflower seeds
  • 270g boiling water
  1. Make the production sourdough: mix the sourdough starter with the rye flour and the cold/tepid water. Cover and leave at room temperature. (Don’t forget to refresh your starter).
  2. Meanwhile, make the main seed mix. Take 300g of the rye flakes and blitz them in a food processor for a minute or two until you have extremely coarse meal. Just how long you blitz for is up to you: next time, I would probably go a little finer than my first attempt than what you see here in the photos.
  3. Add the remaining re flakes, the sunflower seeds and the boiling water. Mix thoroughly (the texture will be something of a sludge). Cover.
  4. Leave both mixtures at room temperature for 16 hours or more.
  • Production sourdough
  • Rye flakes after milling (should have done more)
  • Seed mix

Day 2 – get the bread into the oven

  • Sunflower or other neutral oil for greasing
  • 10-20g salt. I used 10g of sea salt, which wasn’t enough; I’ll be going for 20g next time. It seems to me that if you use conventional rock salt, you need less.
  1. Preheat oven to 160℃ conventional
  2. Choose a loaf tin: the quantities above were about right for a xx tin. It’s ideal to use a loaf tin with a lid (a “Pullman tin”); if you don’t have one, you’ll be having to improvise a lid with a layer of baking paper, an inverted roasting tray and something heavy to weight it down.
  3. Combine your two mixtures and the salt, mixing thoroughly. Some recipes suggest that you knead the dough with a dough hook at this point, for 10 minutes or so: personally, I can’t see the point if you’re using an all-rye mixture which isn’t going to form significant amounts of gluten anyway. I did, however, leave it for half an hour.
  4. Grease your loaf tin with oil and pour the dough into it, pressing it into the corners and forming a flat top (which should come up around ⅔ or ¾ of the way to the top).
  5. Put the tin into a deep-sided pan with water coming up to around half the height of your tin.
  6. Bake for an hour at 160℃, then reduce to 100℃ and continue baking for at least 24 hours.
  7. The bread will be done when it reaches an internal temperature of around 90℃. After the 24 hours prescribed in the recipe, mine wasn’t close, so I turned the oven up to 110℃ and gave it another two hours, by which time the temperature was 82℃ and I wimped out. I shouldn’t have done – another hour would have been better.

Day 3 – bread out of oven

  1. Take the bread out of the oven and wrap it in a cloth. Leave at room temperature

Day 4

  1. Slice thinly – your pumpernickel is ready to eat, preferably with gravadlax, cream cheese and dill sauce!

Around the world in 80 bakes, no.70: Kue Lapis Legit – “thousand layer cake” from Indonesia

Around the world in 80 bakes, no.70: Kue Lapis Legit – “thousand layer cake” from Indonesia

Several multi-layer cakes have featured in this series. But there’s one multi-layer cake to rule them all, which is distinguished by the thinness of the layers and the deliciousness of the caramelisation of each. It’s from the unlikely provenance of Indonesia, where it was originally baked by Dutch colonists, and it goes under several names. In Indonesian, it’s Kue Lapis Legit (Lapis Legit for short); in Dutch, its Spekkoek, named because the stripy layers that you see in cross-section reminded the Dutch of the layers in pork belly (“spek”).

What makes Lapis Legit unique is the cooking method: you spread a thin layer of fairly liquid batter over the cake and cook it under the grill (Americans: broiler) until brown and caramelised, repeating this many times to form the characteristic brown and yellow stripes of the cake’s cross section.

In neighbouring Sarawak (the half of Borneo that is in Malaysia rather than Indonesia), they have elevated Kek Lapis (as they call it there) to a fine art, using multiple colours for the layers and cutting the blocks to form intricate patterns. I’m sticking to the basic yellow-and-brown version, starting from this recipe in “Daily Cooking Quest” by Minnesota-based Indonesian cook Anita.

Although the cake looks complex, it’s not excessively time-consuming, certainly not so by comparison with some of the bread and patisserie items in this blog: it took me around two hours end-to-end plus half an hour’s cooling time. However, unlike normal cakes, that’s two hours of constant attention – there are virtually no periods of down time in which you can do something else while the cake is in the oven.

And the results, even on a first attempt, were absolutely worth it – one of the best and most interestingly different cakes I’ve made.

Setting up

  1. Preheat your oven to 200℃ fan.
  2. Use a cake tin with a removable base. If possible, use a square tin, because the cake cuts into rectangles really nicely: mine is 22cm square and worked OK, but 18-20cm would work better, giving you the opportunity for more layers. Line the bottom with baking paper, grease the sides with butter.
  3. You will need three bowls for your stand mixer. I only have two, so I improvised by making the sabayon mix in a separate copper bowl and using a hand mixer to whisk it, thus avoiding scraping and washing up in mid process.

The butter base

  • 300g butter
  • 120g sweetened condensed milk
  • 1 tbs rum
  • 90g plain flour
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • ¼ tsp ground cinnamon
  • ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
  • ¼ tsp ground mace (if you have it – I didn’t)
  1. If your butter isn’t yet at room temperature, chop it into small pieces and leave it for a few minutes to soften.
  2. In your first mixing bowl, combine the butter, condensed milk and rum. With the standard beater, mix at medium speed until fluffy (Anita says 8 minutes – mine took half that).
  3. Mix flour salt and spices and add to the bowl, mix for another minute or so until smoothly combined.
  • Butter base
  • Sabayon mix
  • Meringue
  • Butter base + sabayon
  • Final mixture
  • First layer in tin

The sabayon mix

  • 12 eggs
  • 85g caster sugar
  1. Separate the eggs: put 12 yolks in one bowl and 6 whites into another, which ou’ll be using for the meringue part of the cake mix (discard the other 6 whites, or keep them for making other stuff).
  2. Add the sugar to the egg yolks and whisk at high speed until the reach the consistency of thick cream. They’ll never quite achieve the stiffness of whipped cream, but you can get close.

The meringue mix

  • 6 egg whites from above
  • 55g caster sugar
  • ¼ tsp cream of tartar
  1. Using the whisk of your stand mixer, beat the eggs at high speed until soft and frothy
  2. Add the sugar and cream of tartar, and beat at high speed until you have a stiff meringue
  • After baking first layer
  • Unbaked layer over baked base
  • Layer after grilling

Putting it together

  1. If the sabayon mix has gone a bit liquid while you were making the meringue, whisk it for another minute or so.
  2. Add the sabayon mix into your butter base and mix using the standard beater until smoothly combined.
  3. Fold the meringue into your mixture until smoothly combined, with no bits of unmixed egg white left.
  4. Pour a couple of ladelfuls of mix into your cake tin and spread it so that you have a thin, even layer. Ideally, you want around 3-4mm thickness (on the photos here, I was somewhat over that).
  5. Put in the middle shelf of the oven and bake until the top is golden. You’ll need something like 8 minutes, but check it after 5-6, because it really depends on your oven and on the thickness of your mixture.
  6. Take the cake out of the oven and switch it to its top grill setting at maximum temperature (or set up your separate grill if that’s what you have). Move the oven shelf to its highest position.
  7. Pour another ladelful or so of mixture into the tin. It will go more liquid as it contacts the hot surface. Your objective now is to get the thinnest possible layer of mixture that completely covers the whole cake: I achieved this by the combination of using an offset spatula and by tilting the tin in different directions until the coverage was smooth.
  8. Put the cake under the grill, and cook until golden brown. This will take between one and two minutes: you need to watch it like a hawk because the difference between uncaramelised yellow and burnt can be as little as 20 seconds.
  9. Take the cake out and repeat until you have run out of mixture. You’re trying to get as many layers as you can – I managed around 8.
  10. Once you’ve grilled the last layer, take the cake out and cool it in the tin for around half an hour.
  11. Finally, put a knife around the sides to make sure the cake has come away from all four sides, and take the cake out of the tin (if the tin has a removable base, this should be very easy).
  12. Enjoy…