as a massive cheese lover, i thank you for that post
now, however, i'm drooling

Well done amigo! Damn, thats a lot of work

after going through all of that i would want to bread and fry some of those curds...

Hey all!

This weekend I am throwing an Oktoberfest at my house. I got a nice keg of Spaten Oktoberfest, a bunch of German pretzels and apfelstrudel from a local German baker, and a ton of brats from a combination of a local American and German butcher.

I want to make some Spätzle, but have never tried it before. It seems as simple as "boil a bunch of noddles, add hot water to this prepackaged sauce, mix and serve" but is it really? has anyone cooked it before, and if so, any helpful tips would be greatly appreciated. I'm cooking for roughly 40-50.

Spätzle is really easy to make. Not sure what you mean by noodles, but you just mix together water and/or milk, flour, salt and egg and then scrape it into boiling water like this women is doing.



Make sure you dip the cutting board into the boiling salt water like she does to prevent dough from sticking to the board. You can also get Spätzle makers instead of scraping, but that's just silly.

Do you have some packaged Spätzle mix you're using? If not, I don't have a recipe on hand, but anything like this should be fine, though some people use milk instead of water.

that cheese looks amazing.

i always though spatzle was potato based for some reason.

The German bakery i am using for pretzels sells these noodles. Noodles from scratch seems risky as a first try thing for 50 people. if I had the time to try it beforehand I might be going for it.

I think I'm more concerned about the sauce. There is a Knorr Spaetzel Sauce I remember seeing when I was there last time, but it seems like there is some discrepancy about the best sauce between a Champignon Sauce or a saurbraten sauce, or some other variation, and some quick googling seems to indicate that the packaged sauce is a Bad Idea (TM).

yeah knorr is awdul dont use that.
it is true that spätzle benefit greatly from a sauce but you can also just briefly saute them in butter or you can go the käsespätzle route.
which is a lot like mac and cheese only with spätzle.
spätzle also often get served alongside a sour lentil stew with speck and wieners. thats also something that can easily be prepared for a lot of people.

awesome cheese post!

poutine and fried cheese curds next time imo

I have made spatzle a couple times from a recipe in a home cooking book put out by the C.I.A. The recipe is basically flour, eggs and milk with some nutmeg and salt and pepper. I quite liked it, but it was nothing close to what I had one time at a restaurant. Braised lamb served with the most amazing spatzle. If I could figure out how to duplicate that recipe, I would have it weekly.

Ok, so here are the deer loins I got from my buddy the other week. The deer was shot in the town I live in. I seasoned the cuts with salt and pepper, threw some garlic and butter in with them and cooked them in my sous vide supreme at 124°F. Here they are pre-sous vide:


In the meantime I made a wine reduction sauce with locally grown shallots, and garlic. The wine is a Wisconsin made black berry and grape wine.



I took some cardboard from an empty beer case, cut it, then wrapped it in foil. This was to plate the wild rice (Wisconsin grown of course!)



I soaked the deer heart strips in buttermilk overnight to draw out the iron/blood (tip from a chef friend of mine). Here is the heart getting lightly tossed in flour before pan frying it.



Venison is out of the sous vide and put into a roaring hot cast iron pan with a foil wrapped brick on top to weight down and help sear that **** quickly.



I used a melon ball cutter to cut some locally grown honey crisp apples into mini balls and sous vide'ed them earlier in a white wine syrup. These were top notch. They don't look like much in the picture, but damn did they tie the dish together imo. The pan fried deer heart is at the top of the plate. The beer is Central Waters - Quisconsing Red Ale out of Amherst, WI. As usual, my drunken sauce plating is sub-par, but oh, well. It was probably the best wine reduction sauce I've ever made and went really well with the rest of the food.



close up:



EMC!!!!!:


I was obviously trying to do a "locally sourced only" meal, and I was pretty happy with the results. The other two people I cooked this meal for said it was the best venison they have ever had.

Wow, looks fantastic. Would pay a lot of money for that meal!

Amazing

Meal looks and sounds beautiful Benny.

***EDF OCTOBER CHEESE THREAD***

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Benny,

You are crushing this thread!

Thanks all for the kind words! If it wasn't for this thread I never would have discovered the awesomeness of sous vide.

I want to see more of Falzure's food! That guy knows what he's doing. He's inspired me to order a spherification kit. I'm excited.

Keep the photos coming everybody. This is probably my favorite thread, I've learned so much from it.

Dried some pork pepperoni

Lots of Chilis, fennel, mustard seed, culture and cure. Came out great!

Very nice, I could never get the nice white mold growing. We gave up on the ground meat sausages because we didn't have room for two curing chambers.

Do you have two (one for the first stage fermentation & a second for the long term cure)?

I just ferment in the oven with the oven light on in a covered dish, basted with the mold-600 solution.

For these I did use two stages of drying though, dropped RH from 75 to 65 after 2 weeks.

I'm at a power plant working on a 30 day maintenance outage right now and just reread the entire thread. A lot of inspiration for me when I return to a place that has a kitchen.

Wondering whatever happened to Snipe, I checked their blog and no posts since Dec 2012.

Faluzure and Benny are rocking it right now and everyone is posting amazing foods. I will have to contribute something around mid-November when I get home again.

Cheers all.

3 days in the oven for the first stage?

I would follow the instructions for your starter culture. This is yogurt cultured, 24h at ~90F

thx

I just bought a case of pork jowls and plan to make some bacon out of it, we have guanciale curing at the restaurant, I may make some of that as well.

got any good recipes or suggestions on things to try on the jowls?