Alsace & the North · Breakfast
Kouglof Alsacien
- Advanced
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, a sweet edge rounding the corners, on a slow, honest burn.
Ingredients
- 500 g strong white flour
- 80 g caster sugar
- 10 g fine salt
- 20 g fresh yeast, or 7 g dried
- 200 ml whole milk, at 20C
- 3 eggs
- 200 g soft butter, plus 30 g for the mould
- 150 g raisins
- 50 ml kirsch
- 24 whole blanched almonds
- Icing sugar, to finish
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · egg · nuts · alcohol
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
- Soak the raisins in the kirsch until plump and the liquid is all but gone, then butter a cold earthenware mould heavily and drop one almond into each flute.
- Mix flour, sugar, salt, yeast, milk and eggs, then work the dough until it slaps clean off the sides of the bowl and stretches to a window without tearing.
- Add the soft butter in four additions, taking each fully in before the next, until the dough is glossy and slack. If it climbs past 24C (75F), chill it fifteen minutes and carry on.
- Fold in the drained raisins, fill the mould one third full and prove until the crown sits a centimetre below the rim and shivers as one piece when nudged.
- Bake at 180C (350F) to a deep chestnut crust reading 94C (200F) at the centre, turn out at once, and dust only when cold.
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.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Mimosa (weekends only)
- Also Right
- Cava, straight
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Fresh orange juice & café au lait
Morning food wants brightness and bubbles, or honest coffee: nothing that argues before noon.
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