#SFATW: A Food Guide From Alsace

Good morning, good afternoon, good night everyone! How are you? I hope you had a wonderful week – or at least that it wasn’t as exhausting as mine was. I’m thrilled to be back today with another theme for my little  #SFATW feature…especially because I will be talking about FOOD. And you know how much I love food, right?

If you want to participate, you can find all the info HERE. You can write your own #SFATW blog post all month – until November 6th – and leave a comment to link it up to my blog post.

ALSO, if you want to participate to the GIFTS SENDING of #SFATW, you can subscribe right here, right now!

Alright, enough with these little details, and let’s get into this post… and talk about FOOD.

There are SO many specialties in France, and you all probably know by heart the clichéd ones: macarons, and…okay I am drawing a blank here and let’s pretend it’s because I am French? For this blog post, I have decided to be more specific, because if I’m staying on French Food this post will be WAY too long and it’d be basically IMPOSSIBLE to choose from all the food. Instead, I’m going to focus on some home specialties, my little region of Alsace.

The salty treats

Flammekueche

If I had to pick ONE favorite food from my home, I think that would be it. I just love it WAY too much. It pretty much looks like pizza, right, and who doesn’t love pizza? The trick here is, the dough is super thin, It’s covered with fromage blanc, sliced onions and lardon, and I love it so much. What’s even greater is that there are lots of different Flammekueche. That one’s the traditional one, but…if you’re more of a sweet tooth, it can be done with apples. Yum.

Bretzel

Credit to laraffinerieculinaire.com

I have NO idea why I just said it’s my favorite before, I love food so much I can’t pick one thing. Pretzel, as you’d all say (in France we say, Bretzel), is simply made of dough tied into a knot. It happens to exist in a LOT of different taste. Like with cheese, for instance.

Choucroute garnie

Credit to Pinterest

Sounds awful. I hate that noun haha. Actually, it’s finely cut cabbage, the taste of it is kind of strong since it’s been fermented a while. I’m no expert in this so I’m not going to explain more. It’s usually served with sausage, salted meat and potatoes. Really, if you ever come to eat choucroute… you probably won’t be too hungry for the rest of the day.

Spaetlzes

Credit to Pinterest

Yes, okay, I lied before. I LOVE spaetlzes so much, I could eat these ALL the time. What’s that weird name, you ask? It’s…pasta. Really. Made with eggs. As simple as that, but it’s delicious, and not like your usual pasta dish. Because it’s way more consistent.

Munster cheese

That one’s for my sister, and for all the cheese lovers out there.  It’s a very strong, soft-and-melting-in-your-mouth kind of cheese. You either love, or hate it, I think. I do love it.

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The sweet treats

I am SUCH a sweet tooth, so obviously I had to do a whole category on that. If I could tell you all my favorites and rant for hours, here are a couple of specialties I hope you’ll enjoy. We share a lot of these specialties with Germany, since they are right…well, literaly next door.

Mannala

Credit to Pinterest

These are my favorites. You’re going to get that a lot. They’re little men-shaped brioches, and they are DELICIOUS. We usually eat these around the Saint Nicolas (the 6th of December).

Pain d’épices

Credit to Pinterest

For once I’m not going to rave about this because I quite don’t like it. In English, this would be…gingerbread. We usually eat this around Christmas time. Christmas time is a wonderful period around here, and it’s filled with food and hot wine and christmas markets. Oops, this is kind of not the subject here…let’s get back to cakes and love!

Kugelhopf

Credit to Pinterest

So I just found out this is also a Swiss and Austrian  cake? It has a very distinctive ring shape and it’s usually filled with raisin, almonds or sometimes even candied fruits. It’s really really good.

 

🍴The recipe

Alright, now…I thought that if you wanted to discover  a bit more of our cooking without actually having to travel that far…Why not try something in your kitchen? I swear it’s a pretty easy recipe to do, even I can do it, and I’m not that much of a cook, ahah. Without further ado, let’s bake….

Bredeles!

These little bredele shaped in whatever pastry cutters you have are delicious, and perfect around Christmas time. Or anytime, really.

📝 What you need (to do about 30 of these beauties):

30 minutes to prepare them
8 excrutiating minutes of waiting in front of the oven
Also, an oven, pre-heated at 180°

250 g flour
125 g softened butter
125 g sugar
1 packet of vanilla sugar
5 egg yolk
1 spoon of milk
Whatever you want to put on top of these: chocolate, multi-colored sprinkles…

What you should do next…

Add the flour, sugar and 4 egg yolk into a bowl.
Stir the ingredients together, and add the softened butter cut in bits. Stir until the dough is consistent.
Let the dough rest for about 2 hours in the fridge.
Roll the dough out: it needs to be around 3-4 milimeters thick.
Cut the dough in whatever shapes you want, with pastry cutters or just a knife.
Put them on a baking tray. Stir the last egg yolk with a spoon of milk and put the mixture on the little bredele, in order for them to have this golden color right out of the oven.
And now…just put them in the oven and wait for about 8 minutes and…Bon appétit as we say here 😉

🍴 Food Guides around the world

Dailey Downing @ The Invisible Moth 🌎 The Finger Lakes area, NY, USA
Jamie @ Watch Game Read 🌎 Malaysia
Lais @ Harumansae Books 🌎 Brazil
Lin @ Lins Perspective 🌎 Bulgaria
Pamela @ Pamela Nicole Writes 🌎 Ecuador
Anne @ Inked Brownies 🌎 Holland
Emma Kath @ Lady Literary 🌎 Canada
Tyra Anne @ Green Gables 🌎 Canada
Salha @ The Journeys of a girl 🌎 Ecuador
@ The Orangutan Librarian 🌎 England
(your link here)

What are the cliché specialties in France for you ?  Which one of these specialties would you try?

Are you more of a sweet tooth, or a savoury treats kind of person? Let’s chat in comments! 💬