Brezeln and Cider

It hasn't been long since our last post, but we've been busy! Christina has handed in all but one of her papers required for this semester, the last one is a proposal for her Masters dissertation. She'll finish it with time to spare and it'll be fun to read I'm sure.
Of course sometimes she needs a break from the tedium.
Yesterday Tina and I bottled up her strawberry pear cider. The bottles now have to sit for a week while they build up CO², and then sit for a further two weeks in a cool place. These final two weeks are important, because the cider needs time to mature. It is drinkable before then, but after at least two weeks the cider will have dropped the majority of its harsh flavours and what you're left with is pretty smooth. The same goes for beer, though the longer you generally wait to taste it, the better.

Specific gravity, consistent for the second straight day.

The bottom of the barrel.

A quick pic before we finish.

After our bottling session we were tempted to start making croissant, but with only 10 hours left in the day there wasn't enough time. The recipe we want to try comes from Julie Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It takes about 11 hours to make them right, and we aren't keen enough bakers to want to work through the night to have croissant for breakfast.
So since we wussed out, we decided to make good ol' fashion German Brezeln (pretzels). It'd be our first time making them, since in Germany there is a baker at pretty much every other intersection where you could buy a relatively freshly baked one for 1,50€.
Christina found a recipe online that got some great reviews; it is in German so we'll have to translate it for you. Have a gander at our Recipes section in the near future.
In the mean time, here are a couple pictures of our Brezel experience. They are very easy to make, easy to store in the freezer, and simple to bake in the morning in a toaster oven for breakfast! So exciting! Brezeln, a part of your healthy and balanced breakfast! :)

Tina hard at work.

Anyway, we couldn't wait for breakfast, so we made them our dinner. You've got to understand, it has been almost 8 months since we last ate Brezeln...  Since we couldn't, in good conscience, just eat Brezeln for supper, we made a small egg salad and had some cheese and grainy mustard with them.

German engineered finished product.

All in all, I must say, we made some pretty damn good Brezeln. Tina said it best: A lot of the time when you bake at home you could say that it turned out great, but it wasn't quite as good as you could get at the bakery. These little babies turned out as good, if not better than from the baker! And so easy! Too bad in Germany hardly anyone would take the time to make them since it is just so easy to go for a short walk to pick some up. Ah well, I guess they have to support those bakers if they want to keep them around.
We, on the other hand, don't have that luxury, so we have to create our own luxuries.

Well, it's been fun., but now I am going to watch game 3 before I write a cover letter. Ta for now.
Matt

Brewing week :D

This week was brewing week in the Audet home. After handing in my stats assignment on Saturday (yeah lots of numbers :)), it was time for some more fun activities. So Sunday we decided to give my lovely strawberry-pear cider kit a go. We first tried this yummy drink when we stayed with our friends Angie and Clint over Christmas and I just looooved it. So we thought it was time to brew it ourselves to make sure we know exactly how to make it before our families are coming for a visit at the end of the year, because we know they will love it too (especially Mareike who is a cider fanatic). So we went out to buy a second bucket and started mixing all the ingredients. To make sure that the temperature would stay between 18 and 24°C we covered it with two blankets (Angie suggested we should use the blankets for ourselves instead, but hey who needs to be warm if they can have cider)  and stored it in the living room. Don't worry, it's in the corner and not very visible. Next Sunday the cider will be ready to for bottling and then we just have to wait another two more weeks before we can start drinking it :) Fingers crossed it turns out ok!

The kit I used - easy and yummy.  Give it a try if you can.

Sorry, a little dark, but you can see the cider in the back and the beer in the front

And because making cider was so much fun and Matt's first batch of beer is running out, we also made a new batch of beer today. But not any beer ... nooooo just the best for Matty: Good old German wheat beer. He even bought the proper German Weihenstephan liquid yeast for the extra nice banana flavor. So as you can imagine, making the beer wasn't quite as easy as making the cider. First we had to sterilize all equipment including the yeast bag and the two cans of liquid beer stuff (I don't actually know what was in them, but they smelled good and where nice and sticky haha). Then, because the yeast was stored in the fridge, Matt had to run around with the bag of yeast under his sweater for three hours to heat it up. I thought he had hurt himself when he opened the door holding his side when I came home from uni, but no he was just cuddling with his yeast :) Anyway, we got it all mixed together and now it is sitting next to my cider, happily bubbling along. Apparently wheat beer goes crazy when its fermenting, so we might wake up in the middle of the night thinking we have a tooting elephant in the living room. We'll see...

That's what we hope the beer will look like. Hmmm and those yummy brezels and obatzda (camembert mixed with cream cheese, onions, pepper, salt and paprika powder)