A Stollen New Year

Happy New Year from Fabulous Pastries!!!  Can it be 2011?  It seems such a strange year to me because I have no associations with it, meaning no movies named after it with evil spaceship robots and no particular end of the world predictions I can recall (Mayan or otherwise).  It’s just another year and somehow not just another year.

The fact that I still have a moment to sit down and write means the baby hasn’t come quite yet.  We now begin the real waiting portion of our program, if you will.  Brian and I have one more day of work before we begin our “paternity” leave and I hope Siena doesn’t take too much time after that to grace us with her presence.  The “waiting” is already becoming interminable.  Each day I have to find lots of things with which to fill my time (this isn’t a difficult task mind you) to keep from spinning my wheels round and round in my head wondering what life is going to be like after her arrival.

I’m sure it will be a shock to no one that baking is a great occupier of time for me.  Aside from shooting things with virtual guns on the Playstation 3, I can think of nothing more homey and relaxing.  There has been a recipe I’ve wanted to try for a couple of years now, a recipe for the German holiday bread called Stollen.  I first saw Martha Stewart and her mother making the yeasty bread on her old show from the 90’s…and every time I see the episode I think to myself “that’s a lot of work”.

I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through all my holiday baking activities with the pending bundle of joy, and I’d been kicking around the idea of making stollen when the panettone came along instead.  These desserts are quite similar in concept and general components, but very different in their flavor profiles because of proportions of ingredients.  Since the panettone came out so nicely, dispelling my fears over their baking process, I thought surely the stollen would come out good as well if I were patient. 

German bakers, particularly in Dresden, have been making this relatively savory bread since the 15th century.  It is beautiful as holiday bread because of the colorful array of dried fruits and nuts found inside, and looked like a rainbow of ingredients before being turned into the cohesive, golden loaf.  There were several things about making the bread that interested me, the first being candied citron.

I’ve never purchased or used citron before and never really even thought to look for it.  It’s a candied green rind of the fruit of the same name.  I guess I was drawn to its otherworldliness with regard to color.  Though I know green ingredients aren’t that uncommon, certainly limes and herbs notwithstanding, but there is something rather foreign to me about this fruit.   The alien nature (and attractiveness) may have been pushed over the edge for me when I went to try and purchase the stuff.

I went to Dean and Deluca, a gourmet foods store in New York City, because they commonly have unusual ingredients on hand most any given time, unless of course they are sold out because everyone else has been buying citron for their holiday baking.  I was not to be discouraged, though, I quickly jumped to the internet to do a Google search for citron in NYC and came up with an Indian/Middle-Eastern food market a mere block from one of the stops on the subway line I take. 

Kalustyan’s Market, on 28th street and Lexington Ave. is unlike any market I’ve ever been to.  I didn’t realize when I did my search that it was a Middle-Eastern market set in a small section of town full of similar restaurants.  I certainly wasn’t thinking of citron as an Indian specialty, and I don’t believe that it is, but the fruit did originate in and around Persian and Iran and has been a staple in some form or other since time was still written with B.C. in the title.  

The smells greeting me in the store were powerful, pungent, floral and earthy at the same time.  There were isles of glass containers featuring beans and rice of all different colors and varieties.  Spices were arranged along shelving in a colorful display next to jars and jars full of jams, chutneys and pickled items.  The most beautiful display of all had to be the nuts and dried/candied fruits.  There were very large, lidded glass vessels containing every vivid color imaginable of dried or brined foodstuffs.  The citron was most otherworldly suspended in it’s jar full of what I assumed to be seawater, the whole fruit cut in half and immersed in the preservative liquid, curing and waiting to be candied for all the world’s stollen recipes.  The iridescent yellow-green reminded me of pods from the movie Alien.  I felt like a creature was growing inside, seemingly an experiment gone wrong, but what a tasty experiment!

I’m not sure why they had the brining fruit on display, but it was certainly fun to look at.  Its candied counterpart was in a jar below next to the candied orange and lemon peels.  I took just enough for the stollen recipe and wandered around to look at the rest of the store.  I acquired the blanched almonds the recipe calls for as well as some candied orange peel and rose water to use at a later date.  I’ve seen recipes calling for rose water and always thought, “Where the heck to do you get that”?  And now I know, and as G.I. Joe always told us growing up, “knowing is half the battle.”

With ingredients in hand I was off to make my stollen.  From everything I’ve read, the bread is a traditional item on the sideboard for Christmas, generally had after the meal or as a breakfast item.  The name originally derives from a word meaning “awaken” and is considered the “early-rise” or breakfast bread.  I thought with Christmas being over already, maybe it could work it’s way into the New Year’s Eve festivities being planned by our good friend’s Andrea and Nathan.  I like the idea of “breaking bread” with friends, and what better night to do that than New Year’s Eve?

I got up on the morning of the 31st and was determined to give it my all and see if I could make the bread come out as prettily as it always does on television.  This recipe calls for shaping the dough into a cylinder, then trimming it every couple of inches to make segments.  The segments become a decorative part of the bread, giving it the appearance of a wreath.  Wreaths being the symbol for eternity (among other things such as status, power and ultimately giving way to the crowns royalty wear) seems an appropriately shaped and symbolic item to take to a New Year’s Eve dinner. 

The coming of the New Year has always been, for me at least, about rebirth and renewal.  I think for most people it’s a chance to feel like they can start over again in some way or begin a new project of sorts.  There is a clean feeling that comes with a new year.  It’s like the snow on the ground before a garbage truck or cab runs through it turning it black and mucky.  So while we can, let us eat the sugar dusted bread and feel “new” once more…or at least use it to soak up some of the champagne.

Now, where was I?  Oh yes, making the bread.  This recipe took about 5 and a half hours from start to finish, so it isn’t a quick one.  I wasn’t in the kitchen the whole time, but it’s time consuming because this being yeast dough needs to rise for two and a half hours for the first rising and about 45 minutes for the second.  Prepping the ingredients was the most time consuming.  There are quite a few of them and depending on what form you buy your fruit and nuts, a little chopping may be required. 

I followed this recipe to the letter aside from swapping out currants with cranberries.  I forgot to look for currants when I was at Kalustyan’s and didn’t end up finding them at my local grocery store.  I do love the sweetness of dried cranberries, though, and they seemed a festive substitute.  The cranberries got soaked in alcohol...the recipe called for cognac, but we had Scotch lying around the house and it seemed to work just fine.  The raisins get soaked in orange juice, and while the fruits are re-hydrating you have time to measure out all the dry ingredients and chop, zest and prepare any of the remaining items. 

This bread calls for two packages of yeast and 5 and a half cups of flour…it’s a lot of bread.  It makes very dense and heavy bread, hearty for serving on a cold winter morning or late drunken evening.  Apparently they have competitions in Germany to see who can make the largest and heaviest stollen, and throughout the centuries has been made large enough at times to feed entire villages via the invention of a giant, specialty oven for just this purpose.  I felt certain it would feed our crowd of ten for New Year’s.

Stollen does take some work, I wasn’t wrong about that.  This is bread made entirely by hand, no mixers allowed on this one folks.  The batter gets stirred together with a wooden spoon, then you add in the nuts, zest and fruits; this is when the kneading begins.  I kneaded for a good ten minutes before the dough lost most of its stickiness, and boy were my arms tired.  Kneading like that is something I never do, and from the way my upper arms felt after is clearly something I should be doing more.  Any way to burn calories while making food is a “good thing” in my opinion.

The dough does its first rise before being rolled out, rolled into a long cylinder and being placed in a ring shape on a parchment lined baking sheet.  Using kitchen scissors and cutting at 2-inch intervals, the wreath shape gets made.  After the bread rises a second time it’s baked for 45 minutes until golden and lovely, the house filled with the smell of toasted almonds and nutmeg.  A light dusting of confectioner’s sugar completes the picture and pairs beautifully with the snowy landscape outside from last week’s “blizzard”.

The party and the stollen were a great success.  Andrea and Nathan went all out, hosting a dinner party for 10 with an 8 month old in the house.  I was impressed!!!  The table was beautifully laid with lots of silver and sparkle, a party setting that was both welcoming and magazine-like (in the best possible way) to my trained eye, and a table I was happy and excited to sit down to.  We had an evening full of warm conversation, great food and talks of babies mingled with board game activities leading us into 2011 I can’t think of a better way to spend an evening or welcome baby New Year.  It’s just who I am.