Cheese & Football Feast day 7: Germany

This was another tough first round clash in the Euro2016 football tournament with Germany playing Poland and the game ending in a draw (earlier error in this post corrected - woke up this morning thing they had won!!). For the cheese feast I chose Flammekueche, a wonderful social dish which is baked in large trays and served on wooden platters for guests to help themselves to, and order more as soon as one has been eaten.

 The base is a made from a very thin white bread dough and the topping is a mix of a fromage blanc style soft white cheese, sour cream or creme fraîche and onion and bacon. Try to get a good dry cured smoked streaky style bacon as the bacon gives this dish much of its distinctive flavour. I may have been a little heavy handed with the bacon on my tart but it was my preference to have quite a lot of bacon. Sweeter onions are good too.

The recipe I based my dish on is from a French Alsace cuisine website here: flammekueche and is written in French but with lots of pictures to make the instructions clearer. I used Italian 00 flour grade for the bread base and for the soft cheese layer a mix of approx 4 parts fromage blanc to 1 part sour cream but I added a little more sour cream after tasting it as the mix seemed a little flat/bland.

The beer was Warsteiner, served nice and chilled.

For dessert we had a baked Polish cheesecake which was nice and simple to make as no crust/base was required.

The recipe came from 'The Polish Kitchen' by Mary Pininska. The printed recipe serves 10 so I halved the quantity for this version and baked it in a square tin with sides approx 20cm long and 6cm deep.

Sernik

125g butter

500g curd cheese

3 large eggs, separated

150g caster sugar

60g raisins

juice & rind of half a lemon

20g potato flour

extra butter and silicone paper to grease and line tin*

Oven 180C

Grease and line the cake tin with the extra butter

Cream the butter

Sieve the cheese if it has any lumps and then gradually mix in to the butter

Add the egg yolks one at a time, mixing well

Add the sugar and mix well

Add raisins, lemon zest and lemon juice.

Whisk the egg whites in a separate clean bowl to soft peaks

Fold the egg whites into the cheese mixture

Finally carefully mix in the potato flour

Pour the mixture into the greased tin and bake for 45mins or until the top is golden brown and cake is set.

Remove from oven and leave to cool before turning out. 

*the original recipe just called for greasing the tin but I chose to line mine with parchment to help remove the baked cheesecake from the tin.