1 kg flour (plain)
200 g sugar
400 g sultanas
almond extract
vanilla sugar
75 g chopped almonds
a little lemon rind and juice
pinch salt
75 fresh yeast
1/4 ltr milk
100 g chopped citron peel
500 g unsalted butter (plus extra for crust)
icing sugar
This is made into dough the usual way (butter needs to be softened).
Form into one or two Stollen shapes, leave to rise again and bake at medium heat.
Immediately after baking, generously spread with soft butter and sprinkle lots of icing sugar on top, until it resembles snow.
Now this is the original recipe as I have it from my aunt (hence a bit vague in places!). She used to live in east Germany; and because they had problems getting all the ingredients (like sultanas, peel etc), we used to send a lot of that to them in November, and always got our Stollen back from them for Christmas (my family lived in the west). The most famous Stollen is, of course, Dresdner Stollen - and that is a protected name, so if you see any sold here under that name and made in the UK, you know it's a fake. In fact, the otherwise recommendable book "Bread Matters" has a recipe for "Dresden Stollen" (which is grammatically incorrect, and maybe he can therefore get away with using that term), that is just a nice wholemeal fruitloaf with marzipan...
I tend to adjust the recipe a bit; use more almonds, no salt, dried yeast (because it's so difficult to get fresh here), slightly less butter (the more butter, the more the Stollen tends to spread when baking - it's fine if you use 500 g in total, including the crust). Since citron peel is difficult to get here, too, mixed peel would do. Definitely no marzipan, no cherries, no spice! The main flavour of Stollen should be butter and almonds. And for whatever reason, the flavour is better in a large loaf; it seems to need "critical mass" to develop.
Maybe Anke has a different family recipe? Would be interesting to compare notes!
To create the typical Stollen shape you roll it out and fold part of it over the rest, so that a bit is left open - the loaf is effectively thinner along on side than the other.
Topic: Stollen (Read 2596 times)
