Sloe, sloe, quick, quick, sloe

Making pacharán

A few years ago my cousin's husband introduced me to some of his home-made pacharán and ever since then, whenever we've been eating out in Spain, I will usually have a little glass of pacharán on ice - for medicinal purposes, you understand!

Pacharán is a speciality of the Basque region, but is available all over Spain. It's a drink made from aniseed alcohol flavoured mostly with sloes and I've yet to meet anyone, apart from non-drinkers, who doesn't like it.

On our return from a short stay in Spain this past summer, I decided to have a go at making it myself at home. My first hurdle was finding the sloes. I've never picked sloes before and had only a vague idea what they looked like. They are, of course, the fruit of the blackthorn, or prunus spinosa, and resemble a small blue/black plum.

Sloes

I read somewhere that they shouldn't be picked before the first frost but, as I didn't want to leave it to chance, I decided to give the sloes a "false frost" by putting them in the freezer for a day or two.

Ready for their "false frost"

 I only had a 70cl bottle of aniseed, so decided to add about 180g of sloes. Other flavourings are a small handful of dark roasted coffee beans, a piece of cinnamon stick and about just over half of a vanilla pod. In one recipe I saw, instead of vanilla, a few chamomile flowers were added.

All the ingredients

Put all the ingredients into a wide-necked bottle or jar, close the lid securely and shake.

Shaken not stirred

And now comes the slow, slow (or should that be sloe, sloe!) wait for three months until it is ready to filter through muslin and drink. By my reckoning, it should be ready in time for Christmas!

Update 15.12.13

This evening I finally bottled and tasted the two batches I made; one flavoured with the vanilla pod and the other with a few camomile flowers. I'm pleased to say, it has passed the taste test :-)

Challah

Many years ago I attempted to make a challah and it didn't turn out particularly well. Not being very good at coping with failure, I put further attempts to the bottom of my "to do" list. 

This year, however, as I explained in my previous post, I've rediscovered my love of baking bread so decided to have another go. Finding the right recipe to try proved difficult. There are many variations on the Internet so the first thing I had to do was narrow the field. The biggest stumbling block was the fact that many of the recipes were American and I had to rule these out straight away as they use cup measures.  At home I have a cup measure that I recently bought to cope with this, but here in Germany I haven't, so I continued my hunt for one in metric measures.  Luckily I came across a site that does the conversion of the recipe for you - allrecipes.com.

Once I'd found the recipe, the adaptation began. I had instant yeast instead of the active yeast called for, so did things in a different order. I used almost cold rather than warm water, added slightly more honey (the jar was almost empty so it seemed silly to leave it!) and most radically of all, I barely kneaded it. Having seen the technique used by Dan Lepard, I decided to risk using it on this dough. I figured that as I'd used more yeast because it was a rich dough, that it might just cope with this technique. Too late, just now, I have found a Dan Lepard version of the recipe which just means I will have to try this version too :-)

Anyway, back to my experiment. I left it to prove and crossed my fingers!

It rose beautifully in the kitchen at room temperature.

There are many ways that challah can be shaped but I decided to go for the standard three-strand plait. I left it to rise again, painted on an egg and honey wash, dropped some poppy seeds on it and flung it into the oven for 35 minutes or so.
I must say, it tastes pretty good. Not at all like shop-bought but that's really not the point!