Author: Mara L.

My Bavarian-Italian theme continues, with an idea that came about because, as beautifully equipped as the kitchen here is, I don’t have a freezer. And I’ve been buying brezen, the Bavarian bread that Americans call pretzels, once in a while. The real thing is just so much better than any version of it that one can buy in other countries! But they don’t stay fresh for long, so after a week or so, I had some stale brezen and other bits and pieces of old bread. What to do? I hate throwing food away, so I decided to make a version of Bavarian bread dumplings. Usually, Bavarian bread dumplings are made with thinly sliced white bread from rolls (“Semmeln”) that have gone stale. So the trick with Brezenknödel is that you substitute the white bread with brezen. I’ve eaten this once or twice at upscale Bavarian dinners, so it was time to try my own version.

I started by cutting the Brezen into very thin slices. You’ll need a bit of time for this and a good knife. And since I had some other old bread, some of it with spices, I added that, hoping it would all come out right.

Next you need a bit of milk and one egg. And in theory, you need parsley. But I used all my parsley for yesterday’s Simple Pasta. So I used basil from the garden instead. For regular bread dumplings, you’ll also need salt and pepper. For my version today, I went light on that, given that the bread I was using was already on the spicy side.

Now you have to mix the dough, which is easiest done by hand. Once the bread has soaked up the milk and egg, take chunks of it and roll them until you have lovely round dumplings.

Bavarian dumplings, of course, tend to be served with meat, and my meat was already simmering on the stove. I had walked into the butcher’s store in the morning, saying I want something to go with dumplings, and the owner recommended what she called an upscale beef stew, cut from a piece that was almost too good for stew. Well, it was perfect! It smelled and tasted almost like game. Perhaps this isn’t a surprise, since the farm animals here are grazing outdoors, eating wild flowers all day. My stew was super simple, prepared like Boeuf Bourguignon (I’ll tell you some other time what my personal version of that is), only that instead of carrots I used some lovely red peppers.

So here it is all on a plate—I hope it looks as tasty and fragrant to you as my guests said it was!

In between more ambitious cooking, I need something simple: spaghetti con zucchine. Following up on my credo that lemon is a great ingredient, here’s a way to make an inexpensive vegetable taste special. No offense, but zucchini can be a little bland. But they don’t cost a lot of money and are quick to cook, so I end up buying them anyway. To make them more attractive, I’m preparing zucchini by cutting up slices and searing them individually. This generates an unexpectedly intense taste. A moment of success: friends in Italy have asked me whether what they’re eating is really just plain zucchini! The slices that are done go on a plate, waiting until the rest of the dish has been prepared. I’m adding salt, pepper, and lemon (yes, again!) while they are sitting on the plate, already crisp and brown. If you cut them very thin, they’ll turn into zucchini chips. But I don’t do that: too much oil, too little vegetable for my taste. Instead I’m cutting slices of 2-3 mm, so that below the crust there’s a recognizable bit of zucchini.

And I wanted a Bavarian response to cooking with sage, a dish based on parsley. But here’s an Italian twist. The parsley, a lot of it and finely chopped, is sautéed by itself in hot olive oil. The taste is rather elevated, as if it was truffle. Full disclosure: I came up with my way of searing zucchini in order to emulate this way of preparing parsley. I’ve heard Italian cooks call it prezzemolo truffelata. But I haven’t found this term online. Perhaps this is just too simple to make it into upscale Italian food blogs.

Meanwhile, I cooked some spaghetti. They’ll get a tiny bit softer once you mix them up with the sauce. So I’m under-cooking them, keeping them a bit too al dente. And then I put everything together: pasta, zucchini, parsley, and more fresh pepper.

Finally, it all goes onto a plate. I still had some of the nice organic mozzarella. This is something I learned in Maremma, one of my favorite regions in Italy. They use mozzarella for lots of purposes where people from Northern Italy use parmigiano, putting little bits on pasta dishes. I love it—it tastes like summer, cool and refreshing.

There’s a garden with herbs and salads right outside of the kitchen where I’m currently visiting. I’ve been carefully harvesting single leaves of salad, following the gardener’s instructions on how to use up a little bit at the time and keep it growing. And I’ve been using bits of thyme and sage. But the sage is so exceptional that I needed a dish that was all about it. I got thin slices of veal, beautifully cut by the local butcher. If you don’t mind splashes of hot olive oil, you can put the meat into the pan when the oil is already heated. In a sense, that’s ideal, because then the meat is seared right away at high temperature. But I prefer to lay out the scaloppine nicely, and I can’t do that when the pan is hot.

If you’re doing it my way, you need a bit of patience. The pan will heat up gradually and nothing much happens right away. You’ll need to wait for the meat to sear. But that’s OK, because with scaloppine it’s not all about the crust. It’s also about moisture and softness. I’m using lemon, and I have strong views on cooking with lemon. For decades, it had a bad reputation, counting as the lousy cook’s way to substitute for tasty ingredients and sophisticated preparation. Everything, chefs say, tastes a bit more intensely with lemon. So using it can seem to be a kind of fraud, as if you’re making your food seem better than it is. My view: that’s all nonsense! Lemon has a wonderful and distinctive taste. And what’s wrong with things tasting better than they otherwise would? So once it looks like the meat is browning up, I squeeze a bit of lemon juice on each piece of meat individually.

All in all, you’ll think this isn’t a whole lot of meat, given how thin it is. Right! I’m not a vegetarian, but I love vegetables and I care about all the reasons for cutting down on meat consumption. So overall, I’m aiming for a vegetable-heavy ratio. And after a few days of cooking, I had various left-overs: bits and pieces of different vegetables and some red wine that turned out to taste a bit different from what we had imagined. Perfect ingredients for a simple risotto, which went nicely with the scaloppine.