It's getting better
A lot of Christmas shopping has been done and the second four loaves of stritzel are in the oven, with one more oven load ready to go in. The tree is set up but still barren. We still don't know if the stritzel will be good. This has not been a good year for stritzel.
Stritzel is a bread my husband's family bakes at Christmas. It has ungodly amounts of butter, eggs, is almond flavored, and is rolled with a layer of almond paste filling inside. No store in town carried almond paste this year. After spending an hour in the local grocery store looking for something that didn't exist I decided to google almond paste recipes. There were several. They are a little bit of work, and most of them required a food processor. I have a tiny processor that fits on my blender base but I knew it couldn't handle this quantity so I was relieved to find a recipe that used a meat grinder to grind the almonds into powder.
First you boil the almonds for a few minutes. Then you pick up each individual almond and slide the brown skin off. The cold wet pale naked almonds then lie on a cookie sheet in a warm oven for a few minutes to warm up and dry out before being mercilessly ground on the coarse setting of the meat grinder. The fine setting of the meat grinder comes next and this is where it all went bad for me. Pushing the chopped almonds through the fine screen squeezed out all of the oil leaving me with long thin tough strings of almonds that resembled shoestrings or pasta - you choose. The strings dropped from the grinder into a bowl of the oil that had been extracted from them.
I am looking for a finely ground paste and this is not looking anything like paste but I still had some optimism. I put the mess in the mixer bowl thinking that if I just mixed it up it would break up into the lovely paste I was dreaming of. It broke up, but not into anything resembling paste. I was just lots of little hard pieces of finely ground almonds that had cemented themselves into a sand-like consistency swirling in an almond scented oil.
I told my husband I'd just wasted $6.50 of almonds. Waste isn't something my husband is too crazy about, but he doesn't think in terms of me making a mistake. He thinks, "I can fix this!"
There is still one more step to making the almond paste. A syrup is to be added to the finely ground powdery almonds. I'd given up before doing this because it was already a lost cause. I don't know what all my husband tried. I couldn't stick around to watch anymore so I drowned my sorrows with an impossible logic puzzle written by Albert Einstein that my son found on the internet. I know that whatever my husband did involved a hot rubber smell from the blender motor and both the blender pitcher and the small food processor container as well as the microwave and the mixer. But after a long time he brought in something he insisted was nearly perfect.
That was two days ago. It has taken me until today to get over my frustration with the stupid meat grinder and the stupid almonds and the stupid recipe for almond paste. The paste still has some interesting texture but its appearance is similar to the stuff I usually buy. My husband has promised to eat all the stritzel I make with this homemade almond paste because it just isn't Christmas without it. Now you know the essence of Christmas. So I made twelve loaves. No use messing up just a little.
Stritzel is a bread my husband's family bakes at Christmas. It has ungodly amounts of butter, eggs, is almond flavored, and is rolled with a layer of almond paste filling inside. No store in town carried almond paste this year. After spending an hour in the local grocery store looking for something that didn't exist I decided to google almond paste recipes. There were several. They are a little bit of work, and most of them required a food processor. I have a tiny processor that fits on my blender base but I knew it couldn't handle this quantity so I was relieved to find a recipe that used a meat grinder to grind the almonds into powder.
First you boil the almonds for a few minutes. Then you pick up each individual almond and slide the brown skin off. The cold wet pale naked almonds then lie on a cookie sheet in a warm oven for a few minutes to warm up and dry out before being mercilessly ground on the coarse setting of the meat grinder. The fine setting of the meat grinder comes next and this is where it all went bad for me. Pushing the chopped almonds through the fine screen squeezed out all of the oil leaving me with long thin tough strings of almonds that resembled shoestrings or pasta - you choose. The strings dropped from the grinder into a bowl of the oil that had been extracted from them.
I am looking for a finely ground paste and this is not looking anything like paste but I still had some optimism. I put the mess in the mixer bowl thinking that if I just mixed it up it would break up into the lovely paste I was dreaming of. It broke up, but not into anything resembling paste. I was just lots of little hard pieces of finely ground almonds that had cemented themselves into a sand-like consistency swirling in an almond scented oil.
I told my husband I'd just wasted $6.50 of almonds. Waste isn't something my husband is too crazy about, but he doesn't think in terms of me making a mistake. He thinks, "I can fix this!"
There is still one more step to making the almond paste. A syrup is to be added to the finely ground powdery almonds. I'd given up before doing this because it was already a lost cause. I don't know what all my husband tried. I couldn't stick around to watch anymore so I drowned my sorrows with an impossible logic puzzle written by Albert Einstein that my son found on the internet. I know that whatever my husband did involved a hot rubber smell from the blender motor and both the blender pitcher and the small food processor container as well as the microwave and the mixer. But after a long time he brought in something he insisted was nearly perfect.
That was two days ago. It has taken me until today to get over my frustration with the stupid meat grinder and the stupid almonds and the stupid recipe for almond paste. The paste still has some interesting texture but its appearance is similar to the stuff I usually buy. My husband has promised to eat all the stritzel I make with this homemade almond paste because it just isn't Christmas without it. Now you know the essence of Christmas. So I made twelve loaves. No use messing up just a little.
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Becca