The Kringle Challenge

A while back, we received our first food challenge from our friend Matt. The challenge: create a kringle at home. We heartily accepted the challenge, despite the fact that I had never heard of a kringle, seen a kringle, or tasted a kringle. Sub-challenge, make two and eat them in one sitting.... not so readily accepted.

Kringle, according to the interwebs, is a Nordic pretzel brought to us by Roman Catholic monks. You can find pretzel-shaped kringles, but apparently the big fat kringle deal is Racine, WI kringle maker, the O&H Danish Bakery. According to these guys, the Olesen family has been making kringles, "a three-day labor intensive process that results in a light, tender and flaky pastry which is truly reminiscent of what you'll find in Denmark," for 60 years. (As a side note, I don't ever remember having kringle when visiting Denmark back in the day, and now feel like I've somehow been cheated.)

Anyhow, with Thanksgiving coming up, I decided to give myself the three days in advance to prepare a Thanksgiving kringle. The challenge was made easier by the fact that the O&H kringle recipe was posted online, so it was just a matter of following the directions in a patient manner. Despite the so-called "labor-intensive" nature of this pastry, it wasn't actually that difficult to make. The dough process is exactly the same as if you were to make any other flaky pastry, like croissants. Never be discouraged by "labor-intensive" recipes... if it's a good recipe, you'll follow the steps and be fine! (And if it's not a good recipe, well... you'll move on.)

Day 1, mix the dough together. This was surprisingly neat and simple -- I dissolved the yeast in a small bowl and sifted flour into it, adding the rest of the ingredients according to the recipe. Probably the only disaster was that my teaspoon of lemon extract ended up being an enthusiastic splash into the mixture while I was measuring it out. At which point I said, "I've spilled at LEAST a teaspoon in, so I'll stop now." The dough came together easily and was soft, pliable, and was emanating a delicious lemon smell. After that it was just a matter of turning it out on a lightly floured surface, working it slightly, and then wrapping it in plastic to go in the fridge.
Butter was softened and spread out onto a sheet. I decided to do this on a piece of wax paper for easy removal. I spread the butter with an icing knife and put that back into the fridge to firm up.

When everything's chilled, roll out the dough into a rectangle. Cut your butter in half and layer it on one side of the dough, then fold the dough into thirds. (Really, I could go into more detail but the recipe is quite easy to follow). The butter is best to get off the wax paper when it's really, really cold. You put it back into the fridge and forget about it.

Day 2, do the same thing with the rolling, and the butter, and the folding, then put it back in the fridge and forget about it. Really, I love recipes where you can forget about things.
This is also a good day to have a debate about what kind of filling should fill the kringle. The recipe provided a butterscotch filling; since this is a traditional danish, all sorts of the usual danish fillings can apply: apricot, cherry, nut, chocolate, etc. Mark, ever the lover of a particular gas station apple pie, chose apple. While you can make your own apple filling, I decided to go with a canned version for ease (this year's Thanksgiving theme was relaxation), and picked up a can from the store.

Day 3, roll the dough out and fold it over itself in thirds, again. They say "be careful not to break the layering of butter" but this was not a problem. Just handle it lovingly, which you cannot help to do anyway, because it is a delicious mix of butter and dough. Cut it in half (the recipe makes dough for two kringles) and roll it out into a long rectangle. I laid two lightly floured cutting boards end to end and did it here. I suppose I could have just done it on the counter, but the cutting boards proved useful (as you'll see below).

If you're not sure what this looks like, you can always go to the "About Us" page of the O&H bakery, where you can learn about the Oleson family and see some pictures of their awesome 70's Nordic mustaches by rolling your cursor over their family descriptions. The "Eric & Michael" picture will show you, indeed, Eric and Michael putting filling on the long strips of dough.

Fill the center of your dough with filling. It looks thinner than it should, but don't forget that the sides of the dough need to meet on top, AND close without oozing filling all over your oven. And, in the end, I used up almost the entire can of filling. I also took some kitchen scissors to the apple slices and cut them up into slightly smaller chunks, to make for easier curling into the classic kringle oval. Fold one side over the filling, wet the edge so that the other side can meet and stick, and begin smoothing it all out.

Caaaarefully bring it all together to meet as an oval. This is where cutting apples into smaller chunks was helpful, as a few big slices near the curves of the oval needed to be removed in order for the kringle's shape to keep (and for the dough to stick together). I tucked one end inside the other to do this. Then I slid it all onto a baking sheet, made the oval a little prettier, flattened it a bit, then covered it and left it alone. Come back to it a while later and put it in the oven according to the recipe.

When we took it out of the oven, the kringle was super puffy, mainly because the filling had cooked and was filling the inside with steam. (When I pushed down on the kringle, I could see little jets of steam escaping from small holes in the dough.) As most baked items do, it shrunk down once it cooled. I slid the kringle off the greasy sheet and onto a clean one, then set it aside to cool.

Let Mark make some plain icing and 'decorate' the kringle, then try hard to forget it's there while you eat the rest of your meal.
So, it was a cause of much excitement when we let out satisfied Thanksgiving burps and said, "Now it's time for kringle." Mark, the true Wisconsinite, cut it into traditional kringle wedges and we had at it. It was lightly lemony, the apple filling was rich, sweet and gooey (next time, maybe we'll add raisins) and, as it happens with most danish, your fingers get nice and sticky from the icing!

There you have it: the kringle challenge of 2009. We'll be taking suggestions for other challenges!

Back Page Veganism, and my rant against it.

In today's NY Times opinion section, a large portion of the back page was given over to an "ethical vegan" to wax non-poetic about how awful all us animal eaters are (yes, even those of us who go in for the humane treatment of the animals we eat). Unfortunately, the guest author's arguments are as unconvincing as the arguments made by the Times' stable of op-eders not named Krugman or Rich.

Mr. Steiner, the oh so ethical vegan, takes it upon himself, a vegan to decide which arguments meat eaters trot out to defend their (our, mine, humanity's) delicious decisions to eat tasty, tasty meat. And yes, I do think that Mr. Steiner might be so crumedgenly because he doesn't get to eat bacon. Suffice it to say, I take issue with Mr. Steiner's article. First off, as I said, he decides which two justifications (as if we need any) meat eaters make. The first, is that us humans are closer to god's image, so its ok for us to eat the less god-like animals. I feel ok, at this point, using the cliched and somewhat childish, OMFG! I don't know a single meat eater that makes this argument, and I pretty much only know meat eaters. His other "justification that meat eaters make" is that humans are capable of suffering, and animals aren't, so again, its ok for humans to eat animals. And, again, no one I know makes that argument.

Hmm, Mr. Steiner (and if you can't tell, I'm calling him Mr. Steiner sarcastically, he actually sounds like a little kid with his simplistic writing), how about a little something called the food chain? We're on top, that's the way things roll, we eat what we will.

I think its perfectly fine to take issue with meat eating, especially excessive meat eating from a carbon footprint standpoint, but Mr. Steiner doesn't make this argument. And while he does somewhat back-handidly acknowledge that at least some of us care about where our meat comes from, Steiner dismisses folks who choose free range meat because those animals still suffer and still, in the end die.

Good for you Mr. Steiner, living your boring little life, not eating meat, pissing off all your friends, and not being able to use band-aids because they have an animal by product in the adhesive. Please, keep on doing what you're doing. That leaves more meat for me.

Homemade Pasta with Prosciutto and Peas

Well, things have been pretty quiet on here lately due to crazy work deadlines and the beginning of a long stretch of travel. But, we promise to keep blogging dutifully and to bring you some goodies!

Sometimes you have those days where all you want is a big plate of pasta to fill your belly. We had one of those days last week. To take a break from work, we decided to make the meal fully collaborative by making the whole thing from scratch. We discussed the project for a while, and ultimately decided on making a light, cream-based sauce rather than a tomato-based dish, to focus on theflavor of the pasta.

Pasta!
Mark threw together some dough using a simple pasta recipe (we like Jamie Oliver's; it's really easy, and how can you pass up a recipe in which the chef says "just bung everything in"?). We used wholewheat flour, which gave the pasta a little bit more texture but was still really tasty--pasta with a bite. Then we got to clamping the pasta roller on to the kitchen counter and cranking away to make thin, gorgeously yellow sheets of pasta. Then, through the cutting roller for gorgeously yellow ribbons. (It's totally possible, if you are very coordinated and neat, to do this on your own... for us, four hands were needed at times to help feed the pasta through and hang them up without breaking.)
Sauce!
While we were at the grocery store, we stopped by the deli case (right in front of the prosciutto and parma ham, my favorite spot) to try to think about what kind of italian meat would go well with our sauce. Ideally, prosciutto would be great -- but our wallets just aren't deep enough for the $23/lb prosciutto they have on display. Thank the food gods for the sign that said, Ask us about proscuitto ends - perfect for soups and salads! Ask we did, and we ended up with a really great, meaty chunk of a prosciutto butt to take home for only about $5 - way better than the thin, pre-sliced sheets you find in plastic packaging, and way cheaper than the fresh-sliced pieces at the counter.

Anyway, excitement over prosciutto aside, we sliced up some onion and garlic, then sauteed those in butter. When those were soft, the meat (cut into small cubes) went in, and then a small container of cream, and about 5-6 oz of grated fontina. You could use any sort of italian cheese for this sauce, but we chose fontina because it had more flavor than parmesan. When that was all melted, we added a big handful of thawed, frozen peas (we had to be lazy in some way!), let it simmer, and that was that.

The pasta, because it's fresh, only boils for a few minutes. With the cream sauce and the light flavor of the peas, it was a really easy-going meal but still gave that good feeling of being full. The pasta was smooth, full of flavor, and the sauce was just cheesy enough with great bites of salty prosciutto. This was a great meal to make after our many previous meals of multi-hour braising and baking.


If you have extra pasta left over, like we did, you can leave it out on a counter top overnight (out of reach from pets) and let it dry. (You might want to form them into smaller shapes/ribbons so that they don't snap when you put them in an airtight container.) We made another pasta dish with the same noodles the other day and they tasted just as fresh!