Butterzopf

Another recipe provided by my sister... the famous Butterzopf. A cornerstone of the Sunday morning breakfast, this specialty bread is as tasty as it looks. Recently I had the opportunity to go through the recipe. So here it is.

Butterzopf dough:

4 cups (1kg) flour

3 dl milk

60g butter

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons sugar

fresh yeast 20g (actually I used 1/2 teaspoon of dry yeast)

1 egg

combine into dough

let rise

make two dough 'sausages' to create the zopf. The actual "zopfing" process is quite difficult to explain. A video of the process is available here .

Paint the Zopf with egg yolk. OK, that was a bit too much. (A confectionary brush would help!)

Put in the cold oven 220C (425F) 30-40 min

The result: quite appealing. Very rustic looking, certainly not the most beautiful Zopf ever, but extremely tasty!

Müesli

A great way to start the day is müesli, or Birchermüesli, as it is sometimes referred to, after it's proponent, the Swiss physician Bircher-Benner, who concocted it for the patients in his hospital. It is our traditional Sunday morning dish. Of course, you can buy a müesli mix, but you will end up eating a lot of sugar, as these mixes are way over-sweetened.

Having experimented with müesli for years, I finally found the perfect recipe, and interestingly, unbeknownst to myself, it is very similar to Dr. Bircher's own original recipe, which is similarly simple.

Of note is also that the word "Müesli" is one of the very few Swiss German words that have gone international... (another unlikely word from Swiss German origin is "Putsch" (as in overthrow of a government)).

Mix:

2-3 cups of oats (Quaker Oats work just fine)

1-2 small vanilla yoghurts

coarsely grate an apple into the mix

add a handful of dried and chopped dates

add organic milk to get the müesli consistency

Of course you can expand this basic recipe with whatever your heart desires: cut strawberries, banana pieces, dried raisins, cherries, whatever. However, I have to say that I really like the plain variety a lot.