This weeks cookbook was decidedly off-piste – Highlights der Kochkunst – Heinz Winkler. We bought this book from Resident Heinz Winkler in Bayern near Munich. At the time, it held at least one Michelin star and was an incredible dinner and an overnight stay. This was part of a fabulous holiday we took years ago. We started by flying to Frankfurt, then to Heidelberg, Baden Baden (for the home of Black Forrest Gateau – Cafe Koenig – See Heston Blumenthal’s “In Search of Perfection”), through the Black Forrest, across the bottom of Germany to Aschau and finishing in Munich. A truly fantastic holiday that I’d love to repeat with the little ones sometime! The cookbook is beautiful but, of course, is in German and with it being a restaurant cookbook, sometimes the recipes are not as complete as you’d like! We cooked a couple of recipes this week. The first was Perlhuhn im Topf which is Guinnea Fowl in a pot. Unfortunately, Ocado was out of Guinnea Fowl this week, so we had Hähnchen im Topf or Chicken in a pot. What was intriguing about this recipe is that the pot is sealed with a salt pastry crust to help the chicken steam and stay juicy. This was a pretty good recipe and a method of cooking. That said, it doesn’t surpass the amazing Bouchon roast chicken recipe from Thomas Keller, which ranks as our favourite and is frankly the most straightforward roast chicken recipe ever.
The next recipe was the most mysterious of cake recipes, Sachertorte. A secret recipe is known only to those at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna. Well, Heinz had a go, and though my german and Google translate are far from perfect, Heinz’s recipe left quite a lot to be desired, so I hopped over to the Sacher Hotel website and between the two cobbled together a recipe which has promise. It’s drier than I’d have liked, but we’ve found a few interesting things by trying the cake. Heinz puts ground almonds in (Hotel Sacher makes no reference to ground almonds, but they talk of secret ingredients, so maybe); both recipes use chocolate couverture. This high-quality chocolate contains a higher percentage of cocoa butter (32–39%) than baking or eating chocolate. Combined with proper tempering, this additional cocoa butter gives the chocolate more sheen, a firmer “snap” when broken, and a creamy, mellow flavour. In investigating this chocolate, I also found that pre-tempered chocolate is a thing that you can buy. It will have the real snap of tempered chocolate that professional chocolatiers achieve when you melt it yourself. I made the covering from the cake using the Hotel Sacher recipe but pretty much stuck to Heinz’s cake recipe. It was a tasty cake but a little dry. Next week we are back with Jamie Oliver for Dinner.