If you missed part 1 of my recipes for this month’s ratio rally, you can find it here.
A Marillenknödle is a southern German and Austrian treat made with apricots (Marille) and wrapped in either choux pastry or a potato dough. I wanted to be adventurous, so I added some crystalized ginger chips to the inside and made a cardamom sugar breadcrumb to dust the outside. The sweetness of these depends on the sweetness of your apricots. But they taste like summer should.
I made the regular choux for some chai cream puffs, and they turned out fantastically. My apricot dumplings on the other hand, were a bit more frustrating. I used the same basic choux dough, but all I had was a sticky mess. I did some googling, and although wikipedia and tons of other sites said that choux is used in making Marillenknödle, almost all of the recipes that I could find were ones that used cheese and were not actual choux. Braving it and thinking that maybe wikipedia was right (and all the sites that said that choux was used to make these), I kept looking. Then, I found a blog in French & German where the poster had the same problem: the dough stuck more to her hands than the apricots. Solution: dip your hands in cold water before making each dumpling. It worked like a charm – as long as I didn’t have too much dough.
I made a second batch after figuring out that researching a French pastry term with a German delicacy was going to fail me, I started looking in German, found the correct name for the dough Brandteig. Some German YouTube videos and 20 recipes later, I had it figured out.
| Gluten Free Marillenknodel |
|
- 8 oz (by weight) whole milk
- 4 oz (1 stick) butter
- 1.2 oz sorghum flour
- 1.2 oz brown rice flour
- 8 oz tapioca flour
- 8 oz sweet rice flour
- 4 eggs
- 4 oz ricotta, strained to remove extra whey
- 1/4 teaspoon xantham gum
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 8 sugar cubes
- chopped crystalized ginger
- 8 apricots
- 1 1/2 cups gluten free bread crumbs
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 4 T butter
- 1 teaspoon cardamom
- Melt the 4 T of butter in a skillet and add the bread crumbs. Toast until golden and fragrant (about 5 mintues). Mix with 1/4 cup sugar and the cardamom. Set aside.
- Slice each apricot along the slit (halfway around) and remove the pit.
- Fill the holes with a sugar cube & a few bits of crystalized ginger.
- Whisk flours, cardamom & xantham gum together.
- Boil milk, butter & salt.
- Reduce heat to medium and add the flour all at once.
- Stir until ingredients start to pull away from the sides of the pot. Remove from heat & put in the bowl of a stand mixer.
- Add eggs one at a time, incorporating each one before adding the next one.
- Add in the ricotta & mix well.
- Chill the dough for at least an hour.
- Bring a large pot of water to a boil.
- Get a bowl of cold water out.
- Dip your hands in cold water and wrap the choux around your apricots. Dipping your hands between each dumpling. This prevents sticking.
- Drop the dumplings in boiling water and cook for 5-10 minutes.
- Drain the dumplings on a slotted spoon.
- Roll them in sugar & toasted bread crumbs once the majority of the water has dripped off.
- Serve warm.
When I am not baking (which, in preparation for this month’s gluten free ratio rally, I have been doing each night), I am usually cooking something delicious for dinner before I do things like design gluten free flour reference charts and illustrate children’s books.
I love cookbooks. I love cookbooks even better when they are filled with amazing photos. I love them the most when there are recipes that are inherently gluten free or require simply choosing one’s ingredients carefully. This is one of those books. Now, if you want to make the fried chicken & waffles on a stick, you are going to have to do some thinking & planning, but for most of the recipes, they were either inherently gluten free or could be made gluten free by using a gluten free equivalent (bread crumbs, soy sauce, etc.).
In the introduction of the book, 
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