Showing posts with label Czech cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Czech cooking. Show all posts

Wednesday 5 August 2009

More on Czech Cakes


Further to my last post about making buchty, I hope your appetite is whetted for more about Cezch cakes. As I said Czech cafes often offer a wide and wonderful selection of cakes. Indeed I had a whole lesson with my Czech language teacher learning the various names of Czech cakes, and very useful it was too. Some are clearly drawn from the Viennese style - wonderful cream and fruit jelly confections called zaluseky, which demand the use of a spoon and fork - but others more obviously Czech in their origins.

One of the most common and most popular is the honey cake – medovy dort, although often named by the dominant brand Medovnik. This is is a light honey and walnut sponge, which sometimes comes with either extra honey or cream. Strudel (both apple and cream cheese) is also common, often coming with cream. Biscuits are called susenky, whilst piskoty are the type of biscuit you use in trifles. Sometimes you will come across a cross between a meringue and a biscuit shaped like a shortbread finger which is eaten with coffee and is called a coffin (after its shape). At Christmas you will find iced gingerbread hearts, houses, devils and anything else you can think of for sale on street stalls and in shops. Whilst at Easter there are the special Easter cakes – including a sponge cooked in a lamb-shaped mould.

The Czechs have a line in dough-based confectionery, these include the buchty of course, the plaited vanilkovka, and zavin (a longer version of buchty which slices). These make an excellent sweet breakfast.

I have only scratched the surface of the wonderful world of Czech cakes, you will just have to come here and try them for yourself.

Sunday 2 August 2009

Making Buchty


I am very fond of Czech cakes. And the Czechs are very good at making them, after all this is a country which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and so in addition to making Czech cakes are adept at Viennese cakes too. They are part of the Czech cafe culture which I have blogged about in the past.

Cakes are an important part of the Czech social scene. Visitors to the house, especially female ones, will often arrive carrying a tin or plastic box saying "I've been baking and I thought you might like one too." You open the box and there is enough cake to keep you going for weeks.

After three years in the country I decided it was time I had a go. Only I cheated and bought some cake mixes. I don't feel too guilty about it, there were an awful lot of cake mixes on the shelves at Tesco's in Cesky Krumlov, so it looks like many Czech woman cheat too. The first cake I made was a thin sponge with blueberries, which I have been given on several occasions by friends. The cake mixture is poured into a baking tray and the fruit (whatever is available - raspberries and red currants work well) is simply sprinkled on top. The cake is then baked in the oven until brown and cooked. The combination of fruit and sponge is lovely.

Encouraged by this simple success, I moved on to a more complex cake - the Czech buchty. The mix requires the addition of yeast and then being left to rise, which it did to rather alarming proportions. I then carefully flattened the dough out and cut it into squares. I put some apricot puree into the centre of each square, folded in the corners and rolled and pinched it in my hands to make a ball. These balls were put in baking tray and allowed to rise further. When they were ready I put them in the oven and baked them until brown. The result can be seen above. These, like the sponge, soon disappeared. As my husband pointed out: they needed to, they would only go dry!

Saturday 20 December 2008

Czech Dinner for the Folks


In my last post I told you that I was planning to cook a typical Czech meal for my family. I did and I am pleased to say it was a great success. At the meal were my parents, my sister Anneliese, my sister Jane (pictured above eating another memorable Czech meal) and her husband and teenage daughters and of course my husband and son. Of those around the table only my parents had been unable to visit our Czech home and taste Czech food. Czech food tends to be much maligned - thought of as rich and stodgy, with lots of dumplings and sauerkraut. And whilst it is true that both dumplings and sauerkraut feature prominently in Czech cuisine, they are infinitely superior to those we get in the UK.

But I digress, back to the famous family meal: the menu consisted of a choice of two soups - wild mushroom and potato, a main course of Czech roasted shoulder of pork with red cabbage and potatoes and finished with a choice of tvaroh or apple strudel. With the exception of one niece who is a fussy eater, my guests ate everything put in front of them and then came back for more.

My mother was particularly taken with the Czech approach to cooking the pork and wanted to know how I had achieved meat which almost melted in the mouth. The answer is that having cut the pork into chunks, rubbed them with crushed garlic and caraway seeds, and placed them in a baking tray with roughly chopped onions, you add water to about an inch depth and cover with foil. You are effectively braising the pork, then you remove the foil cover and roast the meat until the water evaporates leaving a caramelised residue, to which further water is added to create the gravy.

I cannot comment on timings or amounts as the Czech cookery book I used gave neither, something you wouldn't get away with in an English book, you can't imagine Nigella or Delia doing that. But then that is exactly how my mum taught to me to cook and indeed it is how I cook now.

LinkWithin

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...