Norwegian & Icelandic · Dessert
Kleinur
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, warm spice humming through the middle, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 500 g plain flour
- 150 g caster sugar
- 8 g hjartarsalt (ammonium bicarbonate), crushed to a powder
- 3 g fine salt
- 4 g ground cardamom
- zest of 1 lemon
- 80 g butter, melted and cooled
- 2 eggs, about 100 g
- 180 ml whole milk
- 2 litres neutral oil, for frying
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
Draining fried food: a rack, never paper
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Stir the crushed hjartarsalt into the milk and leave 5 minutes; the smell of ammonia is correct and it will cook away. 5 min
- Whisk the flour, sugar, salt, cardamom and zest, work in the butter and eggs, then the milk, to a soft dough just short of sticky; knead 30 seconds only and rest it cold for half an hour.
- Roll 4 mm thick, cut diamonds about 10 by 5 cm, slit each one down the middle and pull one long point through the slit so it twists back on itself; press the point flat so it cannot open in the pan.
- Fry a few at a time at 180C (355F), turning once, until they have puffed and gone deep gold, about 90 seconds a side.
- Drain on a rack rather than paper, and eat the same day; they go leathery as soon as they take up humidity.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Draining fried food: a rack, never paper 77 recipes
- The rack was in place before the first thing went into the oil, not fetched afterwards while food waited in a spider over the pot.
- It lands on a rack with air moving underneath it. Anything set down on paper or a flat plate traps its own steam against its base.
- Salted within seconds of landing, while it is still hot enough to take seasoning.
- A minute later the underside is still as crisp as the top: no soft flat patch where it has been sitting.
- Nothing is stacked or piled while hot, however tempting it is to keep it together. A pile steams itself soft from the inside out.
Where it goes wrong It was drained on paper, or piled up to keep warm. Steam leaving the food has nowhere to go but back into the crust, so the underside softens within a minute: the crispness the frying just bought is gone before the plate reaches the table.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Moscato d’Asti
- Also Right
- Late-harvest Riesling
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling elderflower
Citrus desserts need a wine sweeter than they are, with acid enough to keep up: light, frothy, and low-proof wins.
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