Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Technique Not: Colanders and Spätzle
I made a pot roast the other day, browning the meat, cooking some onions and several cloves of garlic, then sauteing some chopped carrots and celery. A little beef stock and five hours on low in a crock pot made for a great entree, but I wanted to make something different for a starch, so decided on spätzle, using a recipe from Ann Willan's The Country Cooking of France.
I once read that one way of forming the short strands was to force the dough through the holes of a colander, so I gave it a shot. My suggestion? Don't bother. I kept pushing and working away with a wooden spoon and found that the dough exists the colander about as readily as cash leaves a miser's wallet. In the absence of a true spätzle maker, Willan suggests cutting the dough into slivers.
Being lazier, I put the mass on a light cutting board, held the board above the pot of boiling water, and used a metal pastry scraper to pull away strands of dough and flick them off into the pot, which worked reasonably well. As they floated up and cooked for a few minutes, I then transferred them, bit at a time, into a pot of cold water. When all were done, I heated some putter in a pan, added the spätzle, heated it, and then served the pot roast on top.
I once read that one way of forming the short strands was to force the dough through the holes of a colander, so I gave it a shot. My suggestion? Don't bother. I kept pushing and working away with a wooden spoon and found that the dough exists the colander about as readily as cash leaves a miser's wallet. In the absence of a true spätzle maker, Willan suggests cutting the dough into slivers.
Being lazier, I put the mass on a light cutting board, held the board above the pot of boiling water, and used a metal pastry scraper to pull away strands of dough and flick them off into the pot, which worked reasonably well. As they floated up and cooked for a few minutes, I then transferred them, bit at a time, into a pot of cold water. When all were done, I heated some putter in a pan, added the spätzle, heated it, and then served the pot roast on top.
