International Meals – Liechtenstein

Ever since we’ve been together, which at this point is now 22.5 years and counting, Leigh and I have joked that we want to take a tour of the tiny countries of Europe.  Not Luxembourg, of course, that’s WAY too big.

No, we’re thinking Andorra, Liecthenstein, Monaco, San Marino, and the Vatican.

As this tour is not terribly PRACTICAL, we have yet to accomplish it.  But hey – it’s only been a quarter century – we’ve got time.  And we WILL likely be visiting Liechtenstein this summer, so stay tuned for exciting pictures of (checks notes) llamas. Wait, what?

At any rate, this entry deals with the tiny country of Leichtenstein, located high in the Alps between Swtitzerland and Austria.

Two fun facts about Liecthenstein:
1. It has now lost two games in a row to the worst soccer team in the world.
2. Famously neutral Switzerland has either invaded or fired artillery into Liechtenstein numerous times in the last 60 years. Despite this, the two countries still somehow have very close relations.

There are two plausible candidates for national dish of Liechtenstein, and neither is terribly difficult to make, so we did both.  Let’s start with the less decadent one – Ribel.

Ribel is a porridge made of corn meal and milk. Boil milk with a little butter and salt, add corn meal, remove from heat, wait fifteen minutes.  It’s so quick we didn’t even get a picture of the preparation, although you’ll see it in our final picture.  Ribel is often eaten for breakfast, with jam or sour cheese.  Not much more to say about it, honestly.

So let’s get on to the MORE decadent one – Käsknöpfle!

Knöpfle is the Swiss German term for spaetzle, little chewy pasta bits that you may be familiar with.  We made a somewhat related Hungarian version, nokedli, when we did that meal. Käs, on the other hand, is the Swiss German word for cheese. Pasta covered in cheese.  Oh my god, what’s not to like HERE?

OK, so first order of business was to acquire cheese.  As long as you use a mix of alpine cheeses, you’re going to be in the right balpark.  We went with Apenzeller and Gruyere:

Swiss Cheeses

However, a truly authentic Liechtensteiner Käsknöpfle also uses something called “Sura Käs”, literally “sour cheese.”  This is a regional specialty from the Swiss / Liechtenstein / Austrian Alps that DOES NOT travel well, and as such is basically impossible to find in North America.

After some conversation with the friendly staff at the cheese shop, we decided that an appropriate way to get some tagniness into the mixture would be to use French “fromage blanc.”

Fromage Blanc
This stuff’s pretty good – it basically tastes like mild sour cream, with a textrue closer to cream chease.  I’ve been eating the leftovers spread on bread with jam for breakfast.

Much grating later, and we had a big bowl o’cheese.  Which I appear to have forgotten to photograph.  Fortunately, I did get a picture of a cutting board full of onions, because lord knows there’s no way I couldn’t have just borrowed one of those from literally any prior entry in this blog.

Onions.

But no, rest assured, dear reader, that these are the ACTUAL onions we used for THIS recipe.  We spare no effort for authenticity.* (*note: we spare MANY efforts.)

OK, cheese grated, oinions browning, time to make the dough – and here is where we ran into a slight problem.  We grabbed a family recipe from r/Liechtenstein that sounded nicely authentic.  However, it turns out the author had made a SLIGHT typo in their units, and called for 100 cL of water instead of 100 mL of water.

When you put 10 times the amount of water called for in a dough recipe, it becomes batter.

Dough with too much water.

To be fair, this is really my fault – I should have looked at the amount of flour, looked at the LITER of water ready to go, and thought to myself, “Self: you have done a lot of cooking at this point.  Perhaps you should maybe double check this against another recipe before you pour this all in.” Sadly, dear reader, I did not.

The author of the reddit post was quite gracious when we asked about it later, and the post has since been corrected.  And once we adjusted, the recipe was great, so we’re very grateful to them for sharing it.

Just to see what would happen, we tossed in a cup of sugar and tried baking this, and it turns out what happens is a thick, gummy, pancake.

Gummy pancake

Could have tried baking it longer, I suppose.  But who has time to pay attention to the leftovers when there are CHEESY DUMPLINGS to be made?!?

Second batch of batter mixed (we used double the eggs, in line with a few other recipes we found), and allowed to sit for a little bit, we were just about ready to go.

Knopfle Dough

Now all we needed was a Knöpflehobel.

“A what now?” we hear you ask.  A Knöpflehobel!  Actually, we didn’t have one of those, so we used a Spaetzle press that my colleague Stephan was kind enough to loan us. Eggs for scale.

Spaetzle Press

This is a NON trival piece of kit.  And the dough is quite thick, so forcing the dough through the press into a pot of boiling water took some serious effort.  I don’t always make Käsknöpfle, but when I do – it’s arm day.

Making knopfle

These things actually cook pretty quick.  Only a minute or two in the boiling water, and out they come.  After a few batches, we had a bowl full of dumplings.

Knopfle

At this point, all that was left to do was dump the käs into the knöpfle, mix well to let everything blend and get gooey, and then plate everything up with some applesauce and cherry jam.  Our local liquor store, which is generally excellent, somehow failed to have ANY Liechtensteiner beer in stock, so we went with a nice Austrian lager instead.

Liechtensteiner Meal

From upper right, working clockwise, Käsknöpfle with fried onions, Riebel with cherry jam, applesauce. Not the most chromatically varied meal, but oh my goodness… who cares? The cheese on the knöpfle was gooey and pungent and AMAZING.  Could probably have used even a little more tartness from the fromage blanc, but this recipe is unquestionably a winner.

The Reibel was fine – a bit less exciting, but a good side dish.  The jam was definitely an important part of keeping it interesting.  And the apple sauce did help cut the richness of the Käsknöpfle.  All in all, an excellent meal, and I can’t wait to try the real thing when we’re in Peru this summer.  I mean Liechtenstein.

Llamas? Really?

Next up, back to the Baltics!

Recipes:
Käsknöpfle – (We used 8 eggs instead of 4)
Riebel – (The recipe says “1/3 water and 2/3 milk.”  Pretty sure that means 1/3 LITER of water and 2/3 LITER milk.)

International Meals – Libya

For our third African country in this streak, we head to Libya, which makes for a nice variety – Lesotho in the far south, Liberia in the west, and Libya on the Medditeranean coast.

One fun thing we’re learning is the variety of different ways the same ingredients are used around the world.  I’ve joked that at some point we’ll run the statistics on how many entries on this blog start with “Now chop up an onion”, but there’s other parallels as well.

For example, our Irish meal was a lamb stew with barley.  THIS is a lamb stew with barley.  But despite the fact that the top line description is the same, these two dishes are (unsurprisingly) nothing alike.

For starters, rather than whole barley, this recipe calls for barley flour.  Now, we didn’t find barley flour at any of our nearby stores, but rather than go further afield, we just bought barley, and stuck it in a barely-on oven for a bit to dry it out. (or is that a BARLEY-on oven?  har, har, har)

Tray full of barley

We then fed it in batches through our spice grinder.  Took a bit, because barley is quite hard, and we didn’t want to burn out the motor, but eventually we had a nice bowl of barley flour.  Just to be sure, we sifted the bowl, and anything that didn’t make it through the sieve went back into the grinder for a bit.

Homemade barley flour
OK, so – what are we DOING with this barley flour?  We’re making bazeen, one of the national dishes of Libya.  It consists of a single large dumpling, which is then broken apart and used to eat a spicy lamb stew.

Alright, what do we do first? It couldn’t possibly be chop up and sautee an onion, could it?

Onion sauteeing with fenugreek and chiles

Natch.

Also visible in that picture are chopped green chiles and fenugreek seed.  We always have to pause when a recipe just calls for “fenugreek,” because both the leaves and the seeds are used in different parts of the world, and the taste is substantially different.  In this case, however, our original recipe had lots of pictures, so we were able to confirm that seeds were intended here.

To be clear, we don’t MIND that most recipes start with sauteeing onions, because sauteeing onions smell delicious, and the spices didn’t hurt that at all.

Next up, lamb, and in this case we used shoulder, because leg is three times as expensive. The recipe just shows this going in as big hunks, so big hunks we did.

Lamb on a cutting board

This goes into the pot with the onions to brown a bit, and then in go the remainder of the spices and broth.  Spices in this case are garlic, tomato paste, tumeric (LOTS of tumeric), chili powder (lots of that, too), black pepper, and salt.

Lamb stew cooking

After the lamb has cooked for about an hour, you toss in some potatoes to cook in the by now extremely aromatic broth.

Stew with potatoes cooking

And with about 45 minutes to go on the stew, it’s time to get moving on our dumpling.  And at this point, I was starting to seriously doubt our process, since it was so unlike anything we’d done before.  But again – the initial recipe had PICTURES, so we could tell we were at least matching it.

To make the dumpling, you dump a mix of barley and wheat flour into a pot and pour boiling water around it.  You also make a well in the middle of the flour for water to bubble up into. And then… you don’t stir, and you don’t cover.  Which means that at the end of the cooking process you still have a whole bunch of visible, dry flour.

Cooked flour.

This can’t be right, can it?  It’s still largely a powder! But it is apparently a COOKED powder, so… that’s OK?

We decided to soldier on and see what happens.  Flour and water gets dumped into the stand mixer (or kneaded by hand, if you have asbestos fingers) and kneaded to a somewhat gluey dough.

Dough being kneaded

And then supposedly you roll that dough into a big ball, but  … wait, that worked?

Finished large dumpling

Huh.  OK, let’s plate this puppy.

Finished Bazeen

This… looks almost exactly like the picture in the recipe, with the exception that we left out the hard boiled eggs, because we don’t actually LIKE hard boiled eggs. We were somewhat baffled that we had succeeded, but it appeared that we had.

The instructions say that you tear off pieces with your right hand and eat the stew that way. Problem: at no point is it revealed when you change “large hunks of potato and lamb” into “bite sized pieces of potato and lamb.”  So after one or two attempts at tearing bits of lamb off with our fingers, we just went and got cutlery.

It was definitely tasty, though!  The dumpling didn’t taste raw, and was a nice chewy sop for the stew.  The lamb and potatoes also both did good jobs of soaking up the sauce.  We had lots of leftovers on this one, and they all got eaten.

Next up, a country which has now lost two football matches in a row to the worst team in the world.

Recipe:
Bazeen