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2 Jan 2020

Logging for POTA

Posted by khk. 6 Comments

I am a POTA activator, which means that in addition to just logging for my own benefit, I also have to submit an ADIF file to my POTA regional coordinator. The following process is what works for me. It’s not the only way to do this, and it may not be the best way, but it’s what I’ve developed over about 18 months, with more than 60 activations. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Jul 2019

White Sourdough

Posted by khk. No Comments

My sourdough starter needed to be fed, and rather than discard the extra reasonably well-fed sourdough, I planned ahead and started an experiment with white sourdough bread. My goto sourdough recipe is my “Every Day Bread”, but this time I wanted to see what I can do with just wheat flour. Because I almost never bake with pure white flour, I mixed in a good amount of white whole wheat.

IMG 2939

Here is the recipe:

The night before, start the sourdough preferment:

50g reasonably well-fed sourdough starter
300g White whole wheat flour (I use King Arthur)
300g water

Mix the starter with the water and then work in the flour. Do this in a bowl that is big enough to hold at least three to four times the amount of dough you end up with. Cover the bowl and let sit overnight.

The next morning, the preferment should have increased in size and be full of small gas bubbles.

In a mixer bowl add the following ingredients:

650g preferment (see above)
800g AP flour (again, I use King Arthur)
470g warm water (about 80F)
22g salt
1g yeast (just as an insurance policy)

The yeast was just to make sure that something would happen. The next time I’ll leave it out. Bring the dough together on the low mixer setting for a minute or two, then increase the speed to medium and work for five minutes. Place the dough in a bowl and stretch and fold three to four times every five to ten minutes. You should get a nice “windowpane” after the third or fourth stretch and fold round.

Let the dough rise for about two hours (my kitchen was fairly warm, so it may take a bit longer in the winter), it should at least double in size. Divide into two equal parts and form two loafs. Place the loafs into floured bannetons and let proof for another hour or so. Again, the exact time depends on the temperature the dough is exposed to. While the loafs are proofing, put a baking stone in your oven (I put it on a rack about 1/3 up from the bottom) and preheat to 500F. Before you turn on the heat, place a cast iron pan on the bottom of the oven. The preheating will take longer than your oven will make you believe. Even when the oven indicates that it is preheated, that does not necessarily mean that the stone is at the right temperature yet. I usually let it come up to temperature for at least 45 minutes.

Flour a bread peel and place the loaf (one at a time) on the peel, score and transfer it to the baking stone. Do this for the second loaf as well. Close the oven, put on a pair of oven mitts and dump about a cup of hot water into the cast iron pan and close the door again. This will provide a humid environment that will allow the loafs to develop some serious oven spring. Bake for about 35 minutes. Move the loafs to a cooling rack and let cool for at least an hour before cutting into them. When you take them out of the oven, they are not done yet, the baking process continues while they cool down.

This was my first wheat sourdough bread, and I have to say that this experiment was a total success. This recipe will be added to my regular baking rotation.

28 Mar 2019

Compiling Fldigi 4.1.01 on Raspbian Stretch

Posted by khk. 2 Comments

After getting Fldigi 4.1.01 to compile on macOS, I tried it on my Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Stretch. I never had a problem compiling versions 4.0.xx, but when I first tried to build the new version, I ended up with an error message:

make[3]: Entering directory '/home/pi/radio/fldigi-4.1.01/src'
  CXX      dialogs/fldigi-confdialog.o
virtual memory exhausted: Cannot allocate memory

The term “virtual memory” pointed me in the right direction: In a very simplistic view, virtual memory is the sum of real memory and the size of the swap file/partion on a Unix system. The error message indicates that I did not have enough virtual memory. A few seconds of searching on Google revealed the reason: Raspbian uses 100MB of swap space. In general, when you run an operating system from a SD card, having any amount of swap space is probably a bad idea, because repeatedly writing over the same portion of memory on the SD card will wear it out eventually. These cards were designed for cameras, where you take a picture and save it, then take another picture and save it – repeat 100 times. Then you copy the files to your computer and then you may or may not delete these images. In this mode, the number of write operations to the same location is not very large, even if you use your camera every day. That is different when the card is used to run an operating system. There are constant read and write operations going on, and swap space, when you run low on memory gets probably hit with the bulk of it.

In this case however, we need to increase the amount of swap space available to help the compiler to compile this file.

To do that, we need to edit the file /etc/dphys-swapfile. I use vi to edit text files, but you can of course use any text editor you are familiar with (e.g. nano or emacs):

sudo vi /etc/dphys-swapfile

Now search for this line:

CONF_SWAPSIZE=100

Change the ‘100’ to ‘1024’ and save the file:

CONF_SWAPSIZE=1024

At this point, you can reboot to activate the new setting, or you can run these two commands to reconfigure the virtual memory configuration:

sudo /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile stop
sudo /etc/init.d/dphys-swapfile start

Now you should be able to build Fldigi successfully.

Once done, it is a good idea to reverse the change in the swap file configuration and go back to CONF_SWAPSIZE=100.

21 Mar 2019

Compiling Fldigi on macOS using Xcode 9.2

Posted by khk. No Comments

I’ve been using Fldigi 4.0.x for quite some time on my Mac. To install it, I always just downloaded the DMG file and dragged the APP bundle into my Applications folder. When version 4.1 came out, the did no longer work: I am still running macOS 10.12.6, and the new version of Fldigi is no longer available in a 64bit version for older versions of macOS, so I had to download the 32bit version. And that did not run on my system: It always crashed a few seconds after starting it. So, I happily went back to 4.0.18. That is, until David (W1HKJ) posted a survey a few days ago about which Fldigi version people were using on macOS. After explaining my situation, David suggested that I should build from sources instead of downloading the precompiled application.

There is an excellent document available that describes how to build Fldigi on macOS, using Xcode 8: http://www.w1hkj.com/doku/doku.php?id=howto:building_on_os_x – I am using Xcode 9.2 so I should not have been too surprised when I ran into a few problems. After digging through some Google search results, I was able to figure out a workaround for all problems, and ended up with a working version of Fldigi 4.1.01.

If you want to build on Xcode 9, just follow along the instructions, until you run into a problem, then come back here to see how to get around it.

libsamplerate-0.1.9

When you build libsamplerate, it will fail while building one of the examples:

CC       audio_out.o
audio_out.c:435:10: fatal error: 'Carbon.h' file not found
#include 
         ^~~~~~~~~~
1 error generated.
Makefile:469: recipe for target 'audio_out.o' failed
make[1]: *** [audio_out.o] Error 1

We can fix that by changing the path of the included file from to <Carbon/Carbon.h>: Edit the file examples/audio_out.c and search for the include statement from the error message (it’s in line #435), and then change it from
#include 

to
#include &lt;Carbon/Carbon.h&gt;

Now run “make” again, and the build will finish.

portaudio

The next error message is a bit more complex:

libtool: compile:  gcc -c -std=c99 -O2 -Wall -pedantic -pipe -fPIC -DNDEBUG -DPA_LITTLE_ENDIAN -I./include -I./src/common -I./src/os/unix -Werror -arch i386 -arch x86_64 -isysroot /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk -mmacosx-version-min=10.4 -DPACKAGE_NAME=\"\" -DPACKAGE_TARNAME=\"\" -DPACKAGE_VERSION=\"\" -DPACKAGE_STRING=\"\" -DPACKAGE_BUGREPORT=\"\" -DPACKAGE_URL=\"\" -DSTDC_HEADERS=1 -DHAVE_SYS_TYPES_H=1 -DHAVE_SYS_STAT_H=1 -DHAVE_STDLIB_H=1 -DHAVE_STRING_H=1 -DHAVE_MEMORY_H=1 -DHAVE_STRINGS_H=1 -DHAVE_INTTYPES_H=1 -DHAVE_STDINT_H=1 -DHAVE_UNISTD_H=1 -DHAVE_DLFCN_H=1 -DLT_OBJDIR=\".libs/\" -DSIZEOF_SHORT=2 -DSIZEOF_INT=4 -DSIZEOF_LONG=8 -DHAVE_CLOCK_GETTIME=1 -DHAVE_NANOSLEEP=1 -DPA_USE_COREAUDIO=1 src/hostapi/coreaudio/pa_mac_core.c  -fno-common -DPIC -o src/hostapi/coreaudio/.libs/pa_mac_core.o
In file included from src/hostapi/coreaudio/pa_mac_core.c:65:
In file included from src/hostapi/coreaudio/pa_mac_core_internal.h:64:
In file included from /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreAudio.framework/Headers/CoreAudio.h:19:
In file included from /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreAudio.framework/Headers/AudioHardware.h:83:
In file included from /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Headers/CoreFoundation.h:16:
In file included from /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/lib/clang/9.0.0/include/float.h:36:
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk/usr/include/float.h:8:15: fatal error: 'float.h' file not found
#include_next 
              ^~~~~~~~~
1 error generated.
Makefile:227: recipe for target 'src/hostapi/coreaudio/pa_mac_core.lo' failed

What it comes down to is that a file that should be easy to find is not where the compiler expects it to be. We can fix that by setting an environment variable before we run “make”:
export CPATH=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.13.sdk/usr/include

When we now run “make” again, it will get us to the next string of error messages – and I am not showing all of them, just the last few lines. They all look similar and are related.
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.13.sdk/usr/include/stdio.h:235:18: error: pointer is missing a nullability type specifier (_Nonnull, _Nullable, or _Null_unspecified)
      [-Werror,-Wnullability-completeness]
int      fflush(FILE *);
                     ^
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.13.sdk/usr/include/stdio.h:235:18: note: insert '_Nullable' if the pointer may be null
int      fflush(FILE *);
                     ^
                      _Nullable
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.13.sdk/usr/include/stdio.h:235:18: note: insert '_Nonnull' if the pointer should never be null
int      fflush(FILE *);
                     ^
                      _Nonnull
fatal error: too many errors emitted, stopping now [-ferror-limit=]
20 errors generated.
Makefile:227: recipe for target 'src/common/pa_debugprint.lo' failed

This one requires that we edit the file “Makefile”. Open it up in an ASCII editor and search for a line that starts with “CFLAGS = ” – it will contain the command line argument “-pedantic”. We have to replace this “-pedantic” with “-Wno-nullability-completeness”. Once this is done, I would recommend to first run a “make clean” followed by a “make”:
make clean
make

Now just finish the build instructions, and you should end up with a working copy of Fldigi.

20 Oct 2017

The Big Adobe Lightroom Confusion of 2017

Posted by khk. Comments Off on The Big Adobe Lightroom Confusion of 2017

This is MAX week. This usually means exciting news from Adobe about new and improved products, and sometimes frustration with new user interfaces and applications that may not have gotten as much love from Adobe as others.

This year, Adobe created quite a bit of confusion on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom community. When we look back at the Lightroom history, in the beginning, there used to be only one version and life was simple. This was the case up to Lightroom 5. No decisions had to be made, about which flavor of LR to get. In the Lightroom 6 timeframe, Adobe created a second version of Lightroom: Lightroom 6 was the version with the perpetual license (you paid once and then got to use that version until either your operating system no longer supported it, or you had a newer camera that was no longer supported by the version of Lightroom you were using). In addition to that, Adobe also released a subscription based version as Lightroom CC (for “Creative Cloud”). The subscription version had the advantage that the customer received new functionality automatically by just installing the latest and greatest version.

With this year’s MAX, there were a number of changes to this: One of these versions got retired, one changed it’s name, and a new one – sharing the same name as one of the current offerings, but as a completely different product – got introduced.

Here is the gist:

The perpetual license version of Lightroom is gone.

What used to be Lightroom CC is now Lightroom Classic.

Lightroom CC is now a cloud based application, but with local editing.

Because of that confusion, Adobe felt compelled to answer some frequently asked questions: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2017/10/answering-your-questions-on-lightroom-cc-lightroom-classic-cc-and-more.html

I’ll stay with Lightroom Classic, but this last round of changes leaves me – despite the assurances by Adobe – wondering about the future of Lightroom Classic…

31 May 2017

Quick Brioche Burger Buns and Hot Dog Rolls

Posted by khk. No Comments

Quick Brioche Burger Buns and Hot Dog Rolls

Sometimes you need a bun fast, and if it's already afternoon, and you are planning on putting some burgers or hot dogs on the grill later that day, there is no time for slow rising dough, something has to be done quickly. I had this problem recently and came up with this "you can make this in a few hours" brioche rolls.

Course Bread
Servings 12
Author khk

Ingredients

Dough

  • 380 g AP flour 90.5%
  • 40 g white whole wheat flour 9.5%
  • 300 ml warm milk (100F) 71.4%
  • 70 g melted butter 16.7%
  • 12 g sugar 2.86%
  • 8 g salt 1.9%
  • 7 g instant yeast 1.67%
  • 1 large egg 11.9%

Topping

  • 1 egg plus 1 tsp milk for egg wash
  • sesame seeds

Instructions

  1. Mix all the dough ingredients on low until combined, then for about 7 minutes on medium until the dough comes together. This is a very sticky dough.

  2. Cover the mixing bowl and let rise for about 1 hour in a warm spot (e.g. in the oven with the oven light on), or until doubled in size.

  3. Preheat oven to 425F

  4. Divide the dough into 70g pieces and either shape into a ball, or a short "rope" the length of a hot dog. Place the shaped pieces on parchment paper, cover and let rise for about 30 minutes (or until doubled in size). 

  5. Brush on egg wash and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

  6. Bake for 16 to 18 minutes, or until golden brown. 

26 Apr 2017

Pretzels

Posted by khk. 7 Comments

Happy National Pretzel Day! I checked, and Hallmark does not make a card for this important holiday, so all I have is this recipe…

Pretzels in a basket
5 from 1 vote
Print

Pretzels

I used to bake pretzels after boiling them in a baking soda solution, but "real" pretzels are made with food grade lye. You can find my old recipe here: http://www.khk.net/wordpress/2007/07/05/pretzel-baking/

Using lye makes things a bit more complex and a lot more dangerous, but as long as you wear protective gear (latex gloves and goggles) and always put the lye into the cold water (never the other way around!), things should go smoothly. More information about the lye solution is in the notes. 

Servings 12 Pretzels

Ingredients

Pate Fermentée

  • 350 g AP Flour
  • 50 g White Whole Wheat Flour
  • 260 g Water
  • 6 g Salt
  • 1.5 g Instant Yeast

Pretzel Dough

  • 334 g Pate Fermentée (this is half of the amount from above)
  • 485 g AP Flour or Bread Flour
  • 150 g Milk
  • 125 g Water
  • 3.5 g Instant Yeast
  • 10 g Salt
  • 15 g Butter
  • 35 g Sourdough Starter (optional, but if you have it, it's unfed and straight from the fridge)

Instructions

Pate Fermentée

  1. Mix until combined and dough comes off the wall of mixing blown, stretch and fold once, let rise for two hours and store in the fridge over night.

  2. This makes twice the amount of "old dough" that is required for the following recipe, so after it spends a night in the fridge, divide in two, and use one half for the recipe, and store the second half in a freezer bag in the freezer. I usually don't go much longer than four or six weeks, so anything longer than that is an experiment 🙂

Pretzel Dough

  1. Mix all ingredients on low for 5 minutes and on low/medium for 8 minutes. The dough is very stiff and may be too much to handle for your mixer. 

  2. Let dough rise for 60 minutes with a stretch and fold at 30 minutes. 

  3. Divide into 12 pieces, and shape into balls. Let rest for 10 minutes.

  4. Roll dough into 10” long logs and let rest for a few more minutes before forming 20” long “snake” that tapers at the ends.

  5. Form into pretzels and place on parchment lined sheet pan. Let rest uncovered for 15 minutes in the fridge.

  6. Dip pretzels into 4% lye solution (mix 20g lye pearls in 500g cold water until completely dissolved) for 4 seconds, let any remaining lye solution drip off and place on a parchment lined sheet pan. See the notes for more information about using parchment. Sprinkle with pretzel salt.

  7. Bake without stream at 450F for about 20 minutes - or until deep pretzel colored.

Recipe Notes

Here is a bit more about the lye solution: I use "micro beads", which are easier to way and to dilute than "normal" lye. When you buy the stuff, make sure you get "food grade". Here is the source I bought my last batch from: Pure Lye Drain Cleaner - yes, the name sounds horrible, but in the description, it specifies the product as food grade.

When handling this stuff, wear protective gear: Use latex gloves and goggles to protect skin and eyes. I assume that you know what you are doing. The following is just a description of what I do, and should not be understood as instructions to handle a dangerous substance. From this point on, you are on your own. On second thought, do not bake pretzels using lye. It's dangerous and could kill you! If you decide to proceed, it's on your own responsibility.

Whenever you mix a lye solution, always start with cold water and then slowly add the lye to the water and stir until there are no solid parts remaining. Otherwise you may end up with a piece of lye stuck to a pretzel, and that could be a painful experience when you bite into that. Stir until the solution is clear - like water. If you see anything still floating in the solution, keep on stirring. 

I use 500ml cold water and 20g lye in a glass bowl. I then carefully pick up a shaped (but at this time unbaked) pretzel and lower it into the solution with my latex glove protected hands. After about 4 seconds, I take it out, let as much lye as possible drip off, and then place the pretzel carefully on a baking sheet covered with either a silat liner or parchment paper. Some parchment does not like to work with lye covered baked goods: Whatever you put on it may stick to the paper, and you may have to eat some paper in order to enjoy your pretzels. I usually spray the parchment paper with cooking spray to protect it from too much contact with the lye solution.

25 Mar 2017

Apfel Quark Taschen

Posted by khk. No Comments

Quark is a soft fresh cheese popular in Europe. It can be made easily following this recipe by the friendly folks at New England Cheesemaking. This quark is used for both the crust and the filling in the recipe for these “pocket pies”.

Apfel Quark Taschen


Course Dessert
Servings 12
Author Karl Heinz Kremer

Ingredients

Dough:

  • 200 g Quark
  • 180 g AP Flour
  • 20 g White Whole Wheat Flour
  • 200 g Butter cold, cubed
  • 30 g Sugar
  • 6 g Baking powder
  • 1 pinch Salt
  • 1 squeeze Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla Bean Paste or vanilla extract, or seeds from a vanilla bean

Filling:

  • 2-3 Apples cut into small cubes
  • 30 g Sugar
  • 20 g Butter
  • 2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
  • 1 tsp corn starch
  • 170 g Quark
  • 50 g Sugar
  • 2 Eggs
  • 50 g Corn Starch
  • 1 Tbsp Dark Rum
  • Lemon zest from 1 lemon
  • 2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
  • 1 tsp Vanilla Bean Paste see above
  • Egg wash
  • Powdered sugar to dust

Instructions

  1. Preheat oven to 400F
  2. Cut the cold butter into small cubes
  3. Combine all ingredients for the dough in a mixing bowl and mix on low until the dough comes together.
  4. Flour the work bench and roll out the dough into a 4x12" rectangle and fold the long side in twice ("letter fold") to end up with a roughly 4x4" rectangle. Repeat twice. Then wrap the dough in plastic wrap and store in the fridge for at least 30 minute.
  5. Cut the apples and mix with lemon juice to keep from browning.
  6. Mix the apples, sugar and butter in a sauce pan and cook on medium heat until the apples are soft.
  7. Add the corn starch and let boil for a minute. Remove from heat and let cool.
  8. Mix the quark, sugar, eggs, corn starch, rum, lemon zest and juice and vanilla and whisk until smooth.
  9. Fold the apples into the quark mix.

  10. Roll the dough out into a roughly 16x24" rectangle (or two 16x12" rectangles) and cut into 12 4x8" rectangles
  11. Divide filling and place on one half of each 4x8" piece of dough, then fold over the other half and crimp the edges with a fork.
  12. Brush with egg wash

  13. Bake for 20 to 22 minutes (or until golden brown)

  14. Dust with powdered sugar and serve

7 Mar 2017

Every Day Bread

Posted by khk. No Comments

This is my every day bread – or to be more accurate, one version of it. I play around with the recipe on a weekly basis, add things, remove things and adjust the timing or the process a little here and there. You can make this without the two soakers and have a pretty good bread, but the flakes, grains and seeds add something interesting to the finished bread. This all goes back to a German TV program I watched a while ago about Günther Weber and his wood fired bakery at the Lorettohof in Zwiefalten, Germany. The video showed a bread based on two different sourdoughs: Rye and wheat. I took that as inspiration and started to experiment. First with some additional commercial yeast, but eventually relying just on the lifting power of natural sourdough.

There is a book (in German) by Günther Weber with a a number of delicious recipes from his bakery: Gut Brot Will Weile Haben.

If you are not too fond of the sourness of sourdough bread, you can substitute the wheat sourdough part with a wheat preferment (225g white whole wheat, 225g water, 1/8 tsp yeast), and then add 3g minus 1/8 tsp yeast to the final dough. The rye sourdough is very mild and not very sour.

Here area few “family pictures” from a few years of experimenting with this recipe:

This recipe assumes you are familiar with sourdough maintenance, and how to bake bread in a home oven with stream. If you need any pointers, take a look at e.g. Ken Forkish’s book “Flour Water Salt Yeast”.

Every Day Bread

Course Bread
Servings 3 loafs
Author Karl Heinz Kremer

Ingredients

Rye Sourdough

  • 50 g active rye starter
  • 200 g Stone ground whole rye flour
  • 200 g Water

Wheat Sourdough

  • 50 g active wheat starter
  • 200 g White whole wheat flour
  • 200 g Water

Grain Soaker

  • 100 g Grain cereal
  • 50 g Rolled Kammut flakes
  • 200 g Boiling water
  • 1 g Salt

Sunflower Seed Soaker

  • 100 g Sunflower seeds
  • 200 g Boiling water
  • 1 g Salt

Final Dough

  • 450 g Rye sourdough
  • 450 g Wheat sourdough
  • 351 g Grain soaker
  • 301 g Sunflower seed soaker
  • 750 g AP flour
  • 340 g Water
  • 22 g Salt

Instructions

Sourdough Starter and Soakers

  1. Prepare all four sourdoughs and soakers the evening before you want to bake (e.g. 10pm for picking things up again at 9am).

  2. On the next morning, check for standing water in the two soakers, if there is any, reserve and use as part of the water for the final dough.

Final Dough

  1. Add all ingredients to bowl of stand mixer and mix for three minutes on low and one minute on medium. Move the dough from the mixing bowl to a large bowl that allows you to fold the dough. Stretch and fold the dough (I do 20 s&f's) three to four times in five minute intervals.
  2. Cover and let the dough rise in the bowl for 2 to 3 hours, until doubled in size.
  3. Dump the dough on a lightly flowered surface and divide into two or three parts and shape into loafs or boules. When baking three breads, each will be about 750g.
  4. Preheat oven to 500F.
  5. Let the shaped loafs/boules proof for about one hour. Bake with steam for 35-40 minutes. Let cool completely before cutting into a loaf. These breads freeze well: I usually keep half a loaf

Disclaimer: All links to products on this page will use my Amazon affiliate ID. This is how I finance running this site.

21 Nov 2016

Book Review: How “Classic” or “German” is Luisa Weiss’ “Classic German Baking”?

Posted by khk. 3 Comments

[ 9/10/2018: And here we go again: Because of excessive SPAM, I am disabling the comments on this post ]

I know a thing or two about baking… Actually, I know a thing or two about German baking…

I had never heard of Luisa Weiss before I read about her new baking book “Classic German Baking” from David Lebovitz, I was intrigued. I am always looking for authentic German recipes.

Book cover \

I usually refer to the “Bayerisches Kochbuch” when I am looking for e.g. recipes for Christmas cookies, and online resources for bread recipes. I looked up Luisa Weiss’ online presence at The Wednesday Chef. The information posted on her blog showed me that she actually might know about German baking as well, so I ordered the book.

As I always do with a new cookbook – or in this case a baking book – is to look up a recipe I am very familiar with and then compare what the new resource suggests with my experience. Luisa’s book passed this test with flying colors. The recipes I looked at were “Versunkener Apfelkuchen” (I posted about my recipe a while ago: Apfelkuchen) and Brezeln. In addition to that, I also verified that the instructions to make Quark were correct.

Both these recipes were spot on, so I decided to test a couple of the recipes I was not familiar with.

The first recipe I tried was the “Mandelhoernchen” (or Chocolate-Dipped Almond Crescends). This recipe only has a handful of ingredients, and I was a bit surprised about it’s simplicity. However, once done, the Mandelhoernchen were absolutely delicious. There was one point during the process when I thought that the sticky mess I had one my hands (literally) would never end up looking anything like the picture in the book, but it all came together. I used commercial almond paste, but there is a recipe in the book that describes how to make almond paste from scratch.

IMG 4045

After looking through the remaining recipes in the book, I found one that I always wanted to try: Baumkuchen – this is something that usually requires some gadget, so that the cake can be baked on a spit. And be assured, I spent enough time online to come up with a plan for just such a machine… There is however a simpler – but not quite as impressive – approach, and that is what the recipe in the book describes. I had never attempted this before, so I just followed the recipe and ended up with not just a delicious cake, but something that looks spectacular when cut into it.

IMG 4048

As my third recipe, I selected one from the appendix, in which Luisa describes how to make certain ingredients that may not be available as readily in the US than they would be in Germany. I picked the almond paste, that goes into the Mandelhoernchen. I followed the recipe, and at the end, I did actually have almond paste, but I guess I may have added a bit too much water: When I used my own paste in my second attempt to make Mandelhoernchen, they did not hold their shape as good as in my first attempt: They spread out a bit, and looked rather flat. I do not blame the book for this, I think I just was not patient enough to wait until the almond paste came together on it’s own. There is a range given for water to add, and I ended up with a little more than the recipe asked for.

The recipes are all for true authentic German baked goods, and based on my review and my tests, I can say that they produce excellent results.

However, there are a few things that could have been done a bit better in the book:

My biggest gripe is about the pictures – or the lack thereof – in the book. Only a few recipes actually have pictures of the finished product associated with them. Sure, I can google for the names of the different baked goods, and can find pictures online, but part of the fun of browsing through a cook/baking book is to look at the pictures. And, oftentimes it helps to know what the end product is supposed to look like. #luisawherearethepictures

For critical measurements, weights are expressed in metric units in addition to volumetric measurements. I wish this would have been done for every ingredient. In most cases, this is not a big deal, but when we are talking about the lye solution for making pretzels (or Brezeln as they are called in the book), having a more accurate recipe for mixing lye and water would not have hurt. For those who want to know: This is usually done with a 4% solution of lye in water. To create that 4% solution, 40g of lye is added to 1000g (or one liter) of water, or 20g of lye is added to 500g (or half a liter) of water.

So, at the end, this is a great resource for anybody who wants to bring some authentic German recipes into their baking.

Full disclosure: The two links to books on this page are using my Amazon.com associate account, which means that I will earn a few cents when you order via these links. Here are the links again: