Hefezopf¶
456 words on Food
Recently yeast cakes have been popular among myself and my friends. Things like a Zupfgugelhupf or a Hefezopf were made, enjoyed and made again. After joining the fun last week and making my own Zupfgugelhupf, I went for the Hefezopf today. Where the name means you’re making a yeast braid.
So obviously you need some yeast dough first. Making that is fun – I learned it from my grandma many years back. But checking the recipe in a cookbook I was shocked. Usually your grandma is supposed to be the person who spoils you most and feeds your sweet teeth with all the unhealthy things you can get hold of. But reading the recipes in the cookbook by Bocuse suggested that my grandma was very harmless in comparison to those crazy froggies.
Using flour and butter in equal amounts gives the way to yummy unhealthiness. And the six eggs going in the dough for a pound of flour suggest that a lack of cholesterol is not what I’ll die from. All that sounds like overdoing it, but obviously I had to give it a try. Perhaps the hint of dryness that you often find in yeast cakes can be avoided by trebling the amount of calories. It’s so simple!
The French also seem to use much less or different yeast than we have here in Germany. Going strictly by the recipe would have had me let the dough raise for six hours, then work it a little and give it another five hours or so. Using the standard yeast and quantities we have in Germany, you go through both cycles in less than two hours. If I had been patient, I suppose I could have just used less yeast which, in turn, might have made the taste a little less yeasty. But that’d mean the whole process would take pretty much all day.
The fun thing about making a yeast braid is that you split the dough in thirds at the end, make a long roll out of each one and then form a braid. Looks pretty and is a nice real-world alternative to braiding to braided monoidal categories or other mathematical objects – no fear, I could resist trying to form mathematical relations in cake!
To finish things off nicely, the braided dough is covered with a bit of egg. This gives its outside a nice and shiny finish. I may have applied that a bit too thinly, but there we go a nice Hefezopf, which caused the flat to have a yummy yeast cake smell…
This one isn’t very sweet because I only used very little sugar. So it can easily be enjoyed with butter or other things. See more photos on Flickr.
