My younger brother came to visit right before Christmas. He seems to have a fear of failure, plus a lack of confidence in his own abilities. So the last couple of times he’s come to visit, I made him make bread with me – one of the hardest, and therefore most satisfying, things a person can do in baking.
This year, since it was so close to Christmas, we made Stollen. I actually have multiple, very different recipes for Stollen in my cookbooks (and I’m sure you could find many others across the Internet), so I’ll give you the recipe I prefer and then list the possible variations at the end.
No matter what goes into it, though, the softness of the dough makes it a difficult thing to work with. There have been several times that I had to simply throw the dough away and start over because it was more like soup than anything workable. I’ll try to tell you everything you need to know but if you’ve never made bread before, you might simply need to be both adventurous and patient – or just really lucky – if you want to try it.
ingredients
- 2 cups of various dried fruits
- Cognac and water
- 1/2 cup of warm milk (105F-115F)
- 1/4 cup of white sugar
- 1/2 Tbspn of yeast
- 1/2 cup of bread flour
- 1 egg
- 1 Tbspn Cognac
- 1/2 tspn of salt
- zest of 1 lemon
- freshly ground nutmeg
- 6 Tbspns of margarine
- 1 3/4 to 2 cups of bread flour
- 2 Tbspns of white sugar
- 1/2 tspn of ground cinnamon
- 1/4 to 1/2 cup of powdered sugar
Put the dried fruits in a bowl. Pour in as much Cognac as you are willing to spare (I used about 1/2 cup this time); add water to cover the fruits completely. Set aside.
In a large bowl or the bowl of your bread machine, whisk together the warm milk and sugar. Sprinkle the yeast on top and whisk until it’s combined. Let it sit for 5 minutes before adding the flour, whisking again until it’s completely combined. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and place in a warm, draft-free place (in a turned-off oven or on top of the refrigerator, for instance) for 1 hour. It should grow to about 3 times the size. If not, there are a number of things that could have gone wrong: your milk wasn’t the right temperature, your location wasn’t warm enough (normal room temperature or slightly above should be perfect), or your yeast is too old or otherwise not working right. If you want to check the yeast to make sure it is functioning properly, you can proof it:
- Combine the yeast with the amount of warm water called for in the recipe.
- Stir in about 1/8 teaspoon of sugar.
- Check the mixture after about 10 minutes; if it’s bubbly, the yeast is good.
Once you have successfully created this first part of the dough, you can move on.
If you are using your bread machine to mix the dough, like I do, you can simply add the next 7 ingredients and start it on the dough cycle, adding in the drained fruits when your machine says you can.
If you’re doing it by hand, add the egg, Cognac, salt, lemon zest, nutmeg and a little bit of flour to the above. Once that is mixed, add the margarine. Then add the rest of the flour a little at a time until the bread can completely pull away from the side of bowl. On a flour-dusted countertop, using as little flour as possible, knead the bread for a few minutes until it is soft and springy (it should bounce back if you press your fingers into it about a half an inch). Cover loosely with a warm, damp towel or plastic wrap for about 10 minutes. Deflate the dough by giving it a little punch.
Once the dough cycle is done or the dough is deflated, put parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Roll or pat the dough flat as best you can until it’s about 1/2 inch thick. Move it onto the cookie sheet. Sprinkle the top with the cinnamon and sugar. Create a small channel about two-thirds across the short way (so that the channel is parallel to the longest sides of the dough). Fold the dough over onto itself, using the channel as a predetermined folding place. Cover loosely with plastic wrap again and place in your warm, draft-free place for about an hour. The dough should almost double in that time but, if it doesn’t quite, keep in mind that it will probably rise a little bit when you put it in the oven, too.
Heat the oven to 375F. Bake the stollen for 35 to 40 minutes, checking near the end to make sure it isn’t getting too dark too fast. If it is, simply place a piece of aluminum foil over the top.
Once it is done, transfer the loaf to a wire rack to cool. After it is cool, sprinkle the top with powdered sugar.
Other possibilities:
Fruits: Use the same amount of candied fruits rather than dried. They don’t necessarily need to be soaked like dried fruits do.
Liquids: Use water instead of Cognac in the whole recipe. If you are still using dried fruits, cover them with boiling water; they will plump faster. Also, make sure that the water that you add with the egg, salt, nutmeg and lemon zest is warm like the milk so it doesn’t negatively effect the action of your yeast.
Nuts: You can also include 1/2 cup of chopped almonds either when your bread machine says to or with the fruits. I usually leave these out unless I know exactly who is going to be eating it because various people in the family have various issues with nuts.
Lemon: Another possibility, if you don’t want to have a lemon with scraped off skin sitting in your fridge, is dried lemon peel. I would use it but Brad thinks it makes it taste like Lysol (especially with candied fruits).
Flour: Instead of bread flour, you can use all-purpose flour, but I would recommend adding gluten, which can be found in almost any store’s baking aisle. Gluten is what the yeast creates, which helps hold the bread together, but adding your own can make the dough more manageable and greatly improve the texture of the finished bread. (If you have a really hard time with the recipe above, you might even want to use both bread flour and gluten.) You can also make whole wheat Stollen; keep the first part just bread flour but add 1 to 1 1/4 cups of whole wheat flour in the second part.
Sugar: You can use multiple different sugar sources in breads – just about anything that is used to sweeten will do. Different sugars can give subtley different flavors to the bread. However, I wouldn’t recommend using honey for this recipe, since it tends to feed the yeast a lot slower than more processed types of sugar.
Our Stollen came out amazing. Even though I was gifting it to someone else, I wanted my younger brother to get to taste his work, and he really liked it. He doesn’t say much, doesn’t always let me in like teenagers are wont to do, but I could see that he was proud of his accomplishment. And ready to eat the whole thing if I would let him.
