Feeble Attempts in Viennese Cooking: Part 2

Semmelknoedel come from Bavaria and Austra and are on most traditional Austrian restaurant menus. Basically, they are dumplings made from stale pieces of bread, which is not hard to find since bakery and grocery store bread gets stale here very quickly if not purchased in the morning and immediately placed in a better package than it was purchased in. So as long staples like eggs and milk are available, this is a good money-saving recipe. The original recipe I started with (and have only changed a couple directions on for this blog) can be found here: AllRecipes.com "Semmelknoedel"

The ingredients (for four people--the pictures show a half-recipe):

• 1 loaf (about one pound) of stale bread, preferably a moderately dense variety, like French bread; I haven't seen Wonderbread Semmelknoedel, but perhaps they're good.
• 1 cup of milk
• small amount of butter or oil for cooking onions
• 1 onion, finely chopped
  
• chopped parsely--The original recipe I found says 1 Tbsp, but I think you can add more if you're afraid of your fresh parsley going bad in the fridge. The extra parsley makes the Semmelknoedel look more colorful anyways.
  
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 tbsp salt...or just guess
• pinch of black pepper
• a container with cold water to get the mixture off of your hands when you're forming the knoedel
  

Use as much parsley as you'd like! (Well, not enough to make the mixture not stick to itself..)

1. Cut the bread into 1-inch cubes. Feel smart for not wasting stale bread.

2. Heat milk until it starts to bubble on the edges. My milk bubble to the top of the pot, cause I wasn't paying attention; my Semmelknoedel still turned out alright anyways.

3. Pour the milk over the bread, stir the mixture a bit, and let the bread soak for 15 minutes. I covered it; I'm not sure if that's necessary.

4. Instead of staring at this bread, you could be chopping and cooking the onions in a pan with a bit of butter.

5. Mix the eggs, cooked onions, salt, pepper and chopped parsley together. Once the bread's 15 minutes have passed, pour everything into the bread bowl. Mix everything with your hands until the mixture is "smooth and sticky," as the original recipe says.

6. Form the mixture into large (somewhere between baseball and softball-sized) balls. This is when you'll need the cold water; otherwise, half of the mixture will stay on your hands. Drop all 4 or 5 knoedel into lightly-salted boiling water, cover and lower the heat to a simmer for 20 minutes.

Don't remove they cover--they're okay in there. :)

7. Remove the knoedel with a slotted spoon, or, if you're like me and only have a spatula, try not to drop them on the floor, which, thankfully, I did not do. Wait a couple minutes for them to cool down and dry off a little.

8. Serve with lentils and bacon or whatever you come up with. (It would be healthier to make your own and add your own low-fat turkey bacon. For the sake of time, I had some Linzen "mit Speck" from the can.)

A lot of people serve Semmelknoedel with gravy or creamy mushroom sauce, as the cook in the YouTube video below:



(Warning: Overly dramatic music to follow...)


If you'd prefer a quicker video of someone with fancier kitchen equipment (and a marvelous Austrian accent), here it is: