Classic German Cooking
A Q&A with author Luisa Weiss & Bread Dumplings with Mushroom Goulash
Every year when the weather starts to turn brisk, my paternal German roots stir. This mostly shows up in the kitchen, making things like sauerbraten, braised red cabbage, sausages and sauerkraut, but this fall I started taking German lessons for no reason whatsoever. So far, I’ve learned how to order at a café (sprudelwasser means sparkling water), how to say I (my father, son, daughter, etc,) am/ are tall, smart and very nice among other adjectives. But, my personal favorite is how to say “my lovely, cute dog has a wet nose.” In case you’re wondering, it’s “meine liebe süßer hund Sugo hat eine nasse nase.” That one is thanks to the tutelage of our German friend Martin.
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Given all of this, you can imagine my delight when I learned the lovely ’ new book (buy it here!) Classic German Cooking had a fall publishing date. I’ve never purchased a book so quickly! I’ve been a fan of Luisa’s writing for a long time. Her first book, a memoir, My Berlin Kitchen: Adventures in Love and Life, was a favorite of mine when it came out in 2013. She then followed up with Classic German Baking, and as many of you know, I’m not a confident baker, but I bought that one too. She also has a lovely newsletter called Letters from Berlin, which you should subscribe to.
Luisa, who lives in Berlin with her husband and two sons, took time out of her busy schedule to chat with me about her new book, German cooking staples, weeknight meals, what she's cooking for the holidays and much more. She also shared her recipe for SERVIETTENKNÖDEL MIT PILZGULASCH (Bread Dumplings with Mushroom Goulash), which would be a perfect addition to your holiday table and it’s vegetarian!
May I also recommend serving it alongside Juliet’s Pinot Noir? As may remember, I’m a big fan of boxed wine, especially over the holidays when you’re entertaining - it also stays fresh for up to 4 weeks! This one is not only chic to look at, but it’s also delicious.
Paid subscribers, I'll be sharing a dessert recipe from Luisa’s book this Sunday, so be on the lookout!
A Q&A with Cookbook Author Luisa Weiss
We have similar backgrounds. You’re American-Italian and German, and I’m Italian-American and (somewhat) German, although you’re much more of both! What is on your Christmas menu this year and do you incorporate both nationalities at your table? Any fun holiday traditions?
My family and I alternate where we spend Christmas: sometimes we stay at home in Berlin and sometimes we go to my mother’s house in Italy. She lives in a small village in the region of the Marche, which is south of Emilia-Romagna. In Italy, we usually have a simple Christmas Eve meal, like tortellini in brodo, a Romagnolo speciality, and then maybe some sliced smoked fish on buttered toast—a tradition that my Italian family in Brussels introduced us to—and a nice, bitter salad. A big marzipan fish stuffed with chocolate and rum-soaked fruit is brought up by family from Bari to be sliced into little slivers and nibbled for dessert, along with all the perfect citrus that Italians are blessed to have at their fingertips. The big festive meal is with our friends in the village at midday on Christmas Day. We are usually several families crammed all together around a long table and everyone brings a few dishes to share the work and the ages range from 1 to 87 and it’s very cozy and lovely. This used to be a meal that was quite meat-heavy, of course with more tortellini or cappelletti in brodo and a stuffed roast, but some of our friends are vegans now and the group has grown quite a bit so it’s a potluck situation now that is way more vegetable-focused.
In Berlin, the big celebration is on Christmas Eve. This is when the Christmas tree candles (yes, real ones!) are lit for the first time and gifts are placed under the tree to be unwrapped as the evening progresses. I usually do some kind of seafood on Christmas Eve, like spaghetti with shellfish if we’re a small group or a big slab of slow-baked salmon if we’re a bigger one, a fancy salad and a light, but exciting dessert like Zitronencreme from my cookbook Classic German Cooking. I want things to be easy but festive. On Christmas Day, we are usually invited to our American friend’s house, where there is a roast turkey and braised red cabbage and cranberry sauce, plus ambrosia (sliced oranges with shredded coconut) for dessert.
What are a few German pantry staples that you always have on hand and how do you use them?
I always have dried brown lentils and split green peas in my pantry and I use them quite a bit to make Eintöpfe, one-pot stews, for my family, especially in the winter months. I also almost always have potatoes squirreled away in a dark corner of my pantry that we boil to eat with herbed Quark or with a piece of hot-smoked salmon. Any leftover boiled potatoes are easily repurposed as Bratkartoffeln, fried potatoes with onions and Speck, the next day. I also make sure that I always have at least one cucumber and one kohlrabi in my fridge, both of which are quite German, usually just to cut up and give to my kids before dinner, though occasionally I’ll make the effort of turning the cucumber into a very simple salad, too.
Do you have a go-to weeknight dinner on repeat?
Several, actually! Spaghetti with a simple tomato sauce, or a tuna-tomato sauce with capers and parsley. The aforementioned lentil or split pea stew with sausages sliced into it. A big pot of steamed rice with tomato-braised tofu from
. Roasted fennel and tomatoes. And there’s always, always salad. In the winter, usually some kind of endive-citrus salad with toasted nuts (in the summer, it’s usually a green salad with tomatoes).Are there any American ingredients that you make sure to fly home with when you visit?
Double-acting baking powder, chocolate chips, dried Blenheim apricots, pecans, and Sour Patch Kids Extreme for my boys.
What would your ideal German meal be from start to finish?
A delectable piece of roast goose, one plump potato dumpling and a nice tangle of sweet-sour braised red cabbage! This was the Christmas Eve meal that our neighbor Christa, who is from Hamburg, cooked for us for many years and it remains my favorite German meal. It’s so delicious and cozy and special. (Recipes for all three dishes are in Classic German Cooking.)
What (if anything) do you think people have misconstrued about German food? And what do you hope people take away from this gorgeous book?
Well, of course traditional German food is quite focused on meat and potatoes, so there’s some truth to the caricature about the German table. But there’s so much more going on as well. German cuisine is intensely seasonal, with asparagus, chanterelles, strawberries, and plums taking on an almost mythic status when in season. Vegetables and vegetarian cooking play a big role in Germany’s culinary canon, and of course there is the unique tradition of eating things like jam-filled pancakes and fruit dumplings and warm rice pudding as a main meal that I think more people should know about. My hope for this book is that people come away inspired to cook from it for their families, because the recipes are largely quite simple and crowd-pleasing as well as cozy and nutritious. My goal was to get people to look beyond the Bratwurst. I think you’ll find a lot of dishes in this book that have the potential to become family favorites, from chicken fricassee to crisp potato pancakes to Austrian gulasch to cucumber salad.
Favorite thing/s to do when you’re out of the kitchen?
Reading is when I’m happiest, but I also love taking long walks in Berlin’s Tiergarten park with my family.
SERVIETTENKNÖDEL MIT PILZGULASCH
Bread Dumplings with Mushroom Goulash
Luisa Weiss
SERVES 8
This dish is festive and absolutely dinner party–worthy. The goulash can be made with whatever mushrooms are currently available to you, though chanterelles are probably the most elegant ones you could use. Chanterelles are called Pfifferlinge (FIFF-er-ling-uh) in German, just one of many words that prove how lovely the German language can be. Austrians call them Eierschwammerl. Chanterelle season in Germany is a little like white asparagus season; the mushrooms appear between June and October(approximately) in grocery stores and green markets, on special chanterelle-themed menus at restaurants, and even in boxes outside of people’s houses in the countryside where they’ve foraged for them to sell to passersby. If you have a good source for fresh chanterelles, you can make this stew exclusively with them. But at a dinner party I recently threw for a group of girlfriends, I used a mix ofbutton, oyster, king oyster, and portobello mushrooms and the combination of textures, sizes, and flavors was delightful, too. It is traditional to serve bread dumplings with this rust-colored, creamy mushroom stew. The two dumpling options are Semmelknödel or Serviettenknödel. Their ingredients are the same, but Semmelknödel are shaped into round dumplings and then poached directly in salted water, while Serviettenknödel are shaped into a log, wrapped in a kitchen towel, poached, then unwrapped, sliced, and served. During the research for this book, however, I stumbled upon an oven-baked version that intrigued me because it swapped out the poaching steps for a simple bake in the oven. The oven version makes slightly more compact dumpling slices, while poaching them leaves them a bit airier and moister. Since you’re using the Knödel to soak up the delicious gravy, I think a slightly more compact dumpling slice is delicious. But if you’d like, try both and see what you prefer! No matter what kind of dumpling you make, you need to know what to do with leftover bread dumplings: Knödelgröstl! (The adorable contraction of geröstete Knödel, or fried dumplings.) To start, let any leftover dumplings cool to room temperature, then cover them and refrigerate. The next day, slice them into ½inch / 1cm slices. Melt some butter in a sauté pan and fry the sliced dumplings until golden brown on each side. You could stop here, or, while the dumplings are browning, add minced onions and minced speck to the pan for a bit more flavor. Then add a few beaten eggs to the pan, letting them set a bit before flipping and frying until the eggs are cooked and the dumpling pieces are golden brown. Shower with some minced parsley and chives and serve.
FOR THE KNÖDEL
10.5 oz / 300g stale white bread, Kaiser rolls, or Brötchen
¾ cup / 200ml whole milk
2 tsp salt
40 scrapes of whole nutmeg
3 eggs
4½ Tbsp / 70ml heavy cream
3 Tbsp unsalted butter
1 medium onion, finely minced
Handful of flat-leaf parsley, minced
Freshly ground black pepper
FOR THE GOULASH
3 Tbsp unsalted butter
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 medium onions, minced
1½ tsp salt, plus more as needed
3 Tbsp sweet paprika
¼ cup / 60ml apple cider vinegar
¼ cup / 60ml vegetable broth or water
3.5 lb / 1.6kg mushrooms, washed and cut into bite-size pieces
Freshly ground black pepper
¾ cup plus 1 Tbsp / 200g sour cream
METHOD
Preheat the oven to 400°F / 200°C. Cut the bread into slices as thinly as possible or cut into ¼ inch /6mm cubes and place in a very large bowl.
Either on the stove or in a microwave, heat the milk with the salt and nutmeg until it just starts to boil. Pour over the bread and toss briefly. Let sit for 10 minutes.
In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs and cream.
In a small sauté pan over medium heat, melt the butter and add the onion. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is glassy and fragrant, about 5 minutes. It shouldn’t brown too much. Add the parsley and the pepper to taste to the pan and stir well.
Pour the egg mixture into the bowl with the bread and scrape in the cooked onions and drippings.
Stir the bread mixture to combine, but do not press or squeeze the bread. You want the bread to be evenly moistened and the ingredients to be well-distributed.
Place two large squares of parchment paper on a work surface. Divide the bread mixture evenly between the two pieces. Shape the bread into even rolls that are 3inches / 7.5cm thick and 10inches /25cm long. Roll them tightly in the parchment paper, then wrap each roll in an additional layer of aluminum foil so that it can’t unroll.
Place the rolls on a rack in the middle of the oven and bake for 30 minutes, then turn off the oven and let the rolls sit in the oven for an additional 10 minutes.
While the Knödel are baking, make the goulash: Place the butter and oil in a large pot over medium heat. When hot, add the onions and ½ tsp of salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until glassy and fragrant, about 5 minutes.
Add the paprika and stir well to moisten completely, then immediately pour in the vinegar. Stir well, then add the broth. As soon as it’s bubbling, add the mushrooms and the remaining 1tsp of salt and the pepper to taste. Stir, cover, and lower the heat. Simmer for 10minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary.
Remove from the heat and stir in the sour cream.
Unwrap the Knödel rolls and slice into 1-inch / 2.5cm slices. Serve immediately with the mushroom goulash.
Have a good rest of your week. If you make Luisa’s recipe, let me know! This was a joy to work on.
Tschüss und mit liebe,
(Bye and with love)
Colu x
Oh, gosh, this sounds delicious, and I just ordered the book! Thanks, Colu. (And sprudelwasser to you.)
I was hesitant to buy this book (already having a couple of German cookbooks I never use anymore), but this inspired me. It looks really good.
Thanks