New Zealand is a
nation that likes to do-things-itself, perhaps due to the isolated
geography of the islands. Do-it-yourself, or DIY ranges from building
your own house or garden shed, to baking your own bread, to pumping
flooding off your own property.
Perhaps the DIY
culture stems from many generations of desperate immigrants like
myself, who miss a certain item or product from home, and cannot run
to HEMA or Appie Heyn to buy the item, so you have to make it
yourself. Over the years I had successful and less successful
attempts at DIY, for instance I tried ontbijtkoek several times, and
gave up, but I did master oliebollen and colonial peanutsauce.
And now it was time
for a Southern German product, Brezeln.
The most overpriced
selling point of German Brezeln, or pretzels, is probably located in
Frankfurt Airport. Every German I speak with who arrives back in
Germany after a prolonged stay abroad buys a Brezel there. It is the
first Brezel-opportunity after clearing customs and picking up your
luggage, and to jet-lagged Germans the insane prices for not-so-fresh
Brezeln don't matter at that point. I'll admit I had a lot of
overpriced Brezeln there.
Thomas bought some
Weisswurst recently at the German butcher (frozen), and as they came
up in our dinner-planning conversations a few times, there was the
issue of “hmm, but we don't have Brezeln”. (Weisswurst can only
be eaten with Brezeln, for whatever historic culinary reason)
Luckily, in my searching for alternative bread-recipes, I also came
across Brezeln. Here was another DIY challenge.
With our new
breadmachine, it is also easy to make dough. I am not a big fan of
kneading. So all the ingredients went in and the machine created me a
nice dough. I had a pot of boiling water with baking ready and tried
to roll Brezeln. This was not easy, and perhaps I shouldn't have cut
the recipe in half so I would have had more Brezeln to try out the
rolling-technique. The last one doesn't look too bad though.
It appeared we had
run out of baking paper, but the recipe said “an oiled tray or
lined with baking paper”, so I oiled the tray. Next time, baking
paper will definitely save time in actually removing the Brezeln from
the tray.
They are horrible
looking Brezeln, but when I take a bite and close my
eyes, I am mentally transported to Southern Germany, and not to
Frankfurt Airport but to the real bakeries in Freiburg where I used
to buy them.
So this was a great
DIY success, with just a tiny bit of work for the person who is doing
the dishes afterwards.
