Breakfast Jaffle-pie

So, previously I have walked you through making a blackberry jaffle-pie in a jaffle maker. This particular way of cooking really appeals to me since there’s so many variable fillings you can put in, as I’m sure you’ve worked out for yourselves. I’m going to take you through a breakfast jaffle pastie because it’s a filling combination you might not otherwise consider. This particular effort owes itself to another of my breakfast favourites, the basil/fetta omlette. The omelette is basically what it says it is, basil leaves and chopped fetta scrambled up with eggs and served with some toast and a hash brown or two. Adapting it to a jaffle maker was going to take a little thought. Being honest, I will tell you that this recipe is easy, but quick it is not. Save it for a weekend when you have the time to fluff around making something a bit special.  You need a sheet of puff pastry (or more, depending on how many of these you intend to make- one sheet does two pasties) out of the freezer and softening while you get together your other ingredients- an egg, a leaf of spinach, some fetta and some pinenuts.

The first thing you need is the leaf of spinach. If you have a garden, walk up and get one (which is what I do) or otherwise you need to have bought some spinach ahead of time. Use the rest of it to make a quiche or something, we only need one leaf here. Boil your kettle, and tear your leaf into smallish pieces; if you aren’t sure how big you want them, err on the side of smaller. Put the pieces in a bowl, pour boiling water over them, and chuck a saucer or plate on top to keep the heat in, then walk away and leave it.

While your spinach is cooking, chop up your fetta nice and small. Maybe half centimetre strips-ish? Again, err on the small side. By the time you’ve done that your puff pastry should be soft enough to put in the jaffle maker. A critical point here- normally, you would preheat your jaffle maker before cooking things in it. DO NOT PREHEAT for this. Your pastry will be cooked before you get a chance to put your fillings in. Put it in (half will be on the iron and half sort of hanging off), and then with a spoon or your fingers, push the pastry down into the concave bits so that you have a little scoop to put things in. Not preheating also helps with the not-burning-your-fingers bit here. The point of this, as you can see above, is so your egg will sit in there nicely and not ooze everywhere. If you have all your other bits and pieces prepared, you can probably turn on your jaffle maker to start is heating at this point. Check your spinach before you do though, as timing is important to getting maximum tastiness.

Check your spinach, it should be just nicely blanched (which is to say a tiny bit undercooked). If it isn’t, give it a bit longer or refresh with new hot water. Once it’s ready, strain it, and then squeeze the excess water out with your hands (be careful, it will still be quite hot), then disperse it around on top of your egg. I should point out that as I was making this for me alone, I have a different flavour in the other space- basil, parmesan and mushroom. If I was making it for someone else as well, I’d obviously have to do the same thing in both spots.

Next put in your fetta and pinenuts. Be generous with them, they’re your main sources of flavour here. Now, just fold the other half of the pastry over and close the lid on your jaffle maker to let it cook. The trick with this is the egg. You really want to keep the yolk just a little bit liquid (soft boiled-ish) but you still want it heated through. I got it wrong once and the yolk was still cold… ergh…

The best way to do it is to turn the jaffle maker off when it looks roughly like the above. Leave it in the jaffle maker so it continues to cook with the remaining heat, but with the power off it’s going to cook the outside faster and only heat the inside so you cook the pastry and leave your egg soft. Once the pastry’s looking cooked, haul it out and serve.

The results are delightful. There are so many more combinations you can do with an egg, because it means that you don’t necessarily have to rely on spreads, chutneys or cheese for moisture. I’m even thinking of putting hollondaise sauce in one with some double smoked ham and seeing how that comes out. Happy experimenting!

Quark Strudel

When you have an excess of quark on your hands you need to bake something. Quark is a German curd cheese, so to maintain the German theme a strudel seems an appropriated choice. The pastry surrounding a strudel is traditionally stretched until it’s papery thin. Obviously this requires elasticity in the dough, and without gluten elasticity is hard to achieve. This means that making a gluten free strudel is a challenge.

A recent Daring Bakers’ challenge suggested a strudel dough should be so thin you can see the pattern of your tablecloth through it. Lorraine’s photos show that she achieved this amazing feat, so it must be possible (at least if you use wheat flour). Gluten free strudel dough is less accommodating, and mine was certainly not the 2 feet square that the recipe prescribes. It wasn’t see-through either. The tablecloth was only visible where the dough was torn.

When I was rolling up the strudel, the fragile dough burst dramatically, and the quark filling began to ooze out. In the nick of time I remembered my mother’s habit of baking strudels in pyrex dishes, and my gooey strudel was saved. It was ugly, but delicious. If you want to enjoy a quark strudel while avoiding the trials of strudel pastry you could use frozen puff pastry instead. Since this isn’t an option for a gluten free strudel, you could consider making gluten free shortcrust rather than a true strudel pastry. If quark is hard to find you can make homemade quark like I did.

Even though it isn’t pretty, exploded quark strudel tastes good. James actually preferred the strudel to the quark cake I made earlier. The filling isn’t too sweet, so the sultanas have a chance to shine against the lemony background. This filling is so delicious and creamy I would happily eat it with a spoon. This would conveniently avoid the bursting pastry problem too. The combination of quark, citrus and dried fruit is beautiful, and I’m already scheming about a version with orange and currants in place of lemon and sultanas.

Ingredients for the dough
200 g gluten free plain flour
1/8 tsp salt
30 mL olive oil
105 mL water
1/2 tsp vinegar

Ingredients for the filling
~1/2 cup almond meal (for sprinkling)
250-300 g quark
1/4 cup caster sugar
1 egg (lightly beaten)
grated rind 1 lemon
1/2 cup of sultanas (soaked in hot water or rum)

Method
1. Combine the flour and salt, in the bowl of a mixer. Pour in the combined liquid ingredients while mixing the dough. The mixture should come together in a ball, you may need to add a little water to achieve this.
2. Change to the dough hook and knead the dough for a few minutes into a slightly rough ball.
3. Rest the pastry in the fridge overnight.

Next day
4. Prepare the filling by combining the quark, caster sugar, egg, lemon rind and drained sultanas.
5. Then roll out the dough. Flour a clean tablecloth and use your floured hands to spread the strudel dough. It should be able to stretch to 2 feet square, or until you can see through it.
6. Sprinkle the dough with almond meal to absorb excess liquid from the filling.
7. Make a line of quark filling at one end of the strudel dough. Then use the cloth to help you roll the strudel up. The weight of the filling should allow it to roll up if you raise one end of the cloth. You will also need to fold in the sides of the dough to ensure the filling doesn’t fall out the end of the roll.
8. Turn your strudel from the cloth into a casserole dish, or onto a baking tray (if it has enough structural integrity).
9. Bake at 200 ^∘C for 30 minutes until lightly brown at the edges.
10. Serve warm.

Homemade Quark

Ask an English speaker about quark and they’re likely to tell you it’s a physics term that refers to some kind of subatomic particle. Murray Gell-Mann, who won a Nobel prize for his theory about quarks, chose the name because it was a nonsense word. He found it in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, where “Three quarks for Muster Mark” sounds rather poetic, even if it’s somewhat unintelligible.

A German speaker tends to have a truer love of quark, because in German quark refers to a curd cheese. It’s used to make cheesecakes and dips, which are much easier to appreciate than subatomic particles (for me at least). Eating quark cake was one of James’ favourite experiences in Germany, so when he came back my challenge was to make one. In Sydney quark is difficult to find, and only turns up at a few speciality delis. The other way to get quark is to make it yourself.

Searching the internet for quark recipes gives a few results, but they’re almost entirely in German and the methods vary. Luckily my German friend came to the rescue and found a reliable quark recipe. It had a nice scientific explanation of quark making, which included tips like avoiding UHT milk, and how to turn the whey into a refreshing drink.

A few attempts later my friend was satisfied with her quark. Her experiments showed that sour cream was not a good starter culture, but that a buttermilk starter produces the right level of sourness in the quark. A few days later she arrived at work with a container of curds and whey for me to try!

The recipe for quark is simple, with only two ingredients, milk and buttermilk. The buttermilk is the starter, so make sure you have the real cultured variety. The bacterial culture in the buttermilk makes the acids that produce your curd. UHT milk can’t be used because the high temperature treatment (135 ^∘C rather than 72 ^∘C for pasteurisation) can alter the proteins and sugars which the bacteria feed on. Once the culture is started the curds and whey take around 24 hours to separate. Then the curd can be strained out to make quark.

The quark can be used to make cheesecakes (such as this quark cake), to fill strudels and in dips. And the leftover whey? Well my instructions recommended making it into a refreshing drink by adding lemon juice and sugar. The whey drink isn’t great, but the quark is really something special. Muster Mark was pretty lucky to get three quarks, especially if they were quark cakes not subatomic particles.

Homemade Quark (Curd Cheese)

Ingredients
1/2 cup cultured buttermilk
3 1/2 cups full cream milk

Method
1. If your milk is not pasteurised you should bring it to the boil, then allow it to cool to room temperature (covered with a lid).
2. Stir the buttermilk into the milk in a container you can cover, or make the mixture in the insert of your yoghurt incubator.
3. Put the container in your incubator, or wrap it in a towel and keep it in a warm place. One option is to preheat the oven to 50 ^∘C and turn it off before placing the container inside.
4. Allow the culture to proceed for ~24 hours, or until the curds and whey separate. At first the milk will look grainy, and eventually the curds will float on the whey. The grainy stage is probably sufficient, but might give a lower yield.
5. Dampen a clean tea towel and use it to line a sieve. Place the sieve over a basin. Pour the curds and whey into the strainer. Bring the tea towel together so that it covers your quark and do it up with a rubber band. Place the entire draining apparatus in the fridge.
6. Allow to drain in the fridge overnight, or for 24 hours. The drained quark should have a consistency similar to sour cream, but it has a more sour taste.

Quark Cake

How do you say Eischnee in English? A direct translation from German would make it egg snow, which is rather pretty. Unfortunately the idiomatic version in English is probably the less poetic beaten eggwhite. The reason for translating a German recipe is that James has been raving about Quark Cake since he came back from Germany. Quark is a German curd cheese, which is more sour than sour cream, but similar in texture. Since James is not normally a lover of cheesecakes, the quark version must have been pretty special. The difficult part about making this cheesecake is that quark is not readily available in Sydney.

One Austrian friend managed to find organic quark at a speciality deli, but the price was exorbitant. Luckily another friend is both a home cook and a native speaker of German. She has been missing quark, so before long she found some recipes for both the quark itself, and for Quark Cake. Knowing James, she didn’t translate them, since that would be denying him the opportunity to practise his German.

Having made some quark (see the post on homemade quark), all that remained was to choose a Quark Cake recipe. Since James had amnesia regarding all features of the cake he’d had (barring its yumminess), all options were open. Why not choose something out of the ordinary then – a baked cheesecake with beaten egg white? It sounded different, and the lemon zest and rum-soaked raisin flavours were appealing.

In a last-ditch attempt to reduce the saturated fat content of this recipe I used a sweet, gluten free version of Heidi’s Olive Oil Shortcrust for the pastry case. This crust is a little crunchy for a cheesecake, so feel free to substitute your favourite melt-in-the-mouth short crust recipe. After all, you can’t be good all the time.

This Quark Cake is soft, and well endowed with rum-soaked raisins. The lemon zest keeps it from being too sweet. The tang of quark makes the cake quite different from a cream cheese-based cheesecake, so it’s definitely worth making quark for it. It’s not too fiddly, and it’s a less time consuming way to get your quark fix than a trip to Germany!

Ingredients for the Quark Filling
fills a 22cm short crust pastry case
250g quark
130g castor sugar
2 eggs, separated
rind of half a lemon
50g butter (melted)
30g gluten free plain flour
80g raisins soaked in rum

Method for the Quark Filling
1. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celcius.
2. Separate the eggs.
3. Combine the yolks and half the sugar with the quark. Mix it thoroughly.
4. Add the lemon zest, then the melted butter and mix well.
5. Sift in the flour and combine.
6. Drain the raisins (which you’ve soaked in rum for at least an hour), and add them too. Ensure they are well drained or the alcohol could curdle the mixture.
7. Beat the egg whites with the other half of the sugar until stiff peaks form.
8. Add 1/4 of the egg white to the quark mixture and fold in.
9. Then fold in the remainder of the beaten egg whites.
10. Pour into a cooled pastry case (22cm diameter).
11. Bake at 160 degrees Celcius for ~45 min. When the cake is cooked the centre will spring back when lightly touched and a skewer will come out clean.

Ingredients for the Olive Oil Short Crust (gluten free)
alternatively blind bake your favourite short crust pastry in a 22cm tart tin
200g gluten free plain flour
50g brown rice flour
50g castor sugar
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup water

Method for the Olive Oil Short Crust (gluten free)
1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celcius.
2. Combine the sifted flours and sugar with the olive oil.
3. Add the water very gradually until the dough comes together in a ball. You won’t need all the water, so add it only a little at a time.
4. Roll out the pastry on a lightly floured board until it is the right size for your 22cm tart tin. Loosen the pastry with a palette knife and roll it around your rolling pin while you transport it into the pan. If it cracks (and since it’s gluten free you’re a hero if it doesn’t), then poke it together with your fingers.
5. Prick the pastry with a fork and cover lightly with uncooked rice, then bake blind for ~25 mins at 200 degrees Celcius.