Swiss Apple Pasta

Keywords:	Dessert ¦ Swiss cuisine ¦ Homemade Pasta ¦ Traditional ¦ Dessert Pasta ¦ Apple
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Extraordinary apple spätzle from Thurgau, the apple orchard of Switzerland on the beautiful Bodensee lake between Switzerland, Austria and Germany.

You'll find spàtzli [shpatetslee] all over German-speaking Europe, but apple spätzli for dessert is a rather unique contribution from the Swiss canton of Thurgau, right on the German border just across from where they built the Zeppelin. Apple are such a religion that the canton is sometimes called 'Mostindien' - Ciderland.

Apfelspötzli (also spätzle)
300gr flour
pinch of salt
2 tbsp sugar
pinch of cinammon
3 eggs
1 apple
1 glass apple juice
Breadcrumbs
50gr butter
More sugar and cinammon

Sift the flour and make a well. Add the eggs. Here I used a large Moroccan gsâ bowl in cherry wood. Please excuse the funny colors, I made this and the following three pictures with a tilt-shift lens and 3 shots HDR, a bit of fancy digital trickery with modest results.

Mix in the apple juice, sugar, salt and cinammon. Break the yolks and mix the liquid.

Combine everything with a wooden spoon. You can also do this in a mixer.

Add enough flour or enough liquid to obtain a smooth dough liquid enough to go through pea-sized holes (see below). You can always add a little liquid later if too hard.

We will now mix an apple with the spätzli dough.

Peel the apple and grate it finely ...

... be quick and don't let it turn brown.

As soon as you have finished grating the apple, add it to the spätzli ...

... and mix it in. Don't let the apple turn brown.

Plan your workspace with a pot of salted boiling water in the center, a dish inside another filled with hot water to keep the spatzle hot and the spätzli dough on the side. Add a plate to put your tools down, a strainer and kitchen gloves. Ready to go!

As a Swiss lover of world cuisine, I go to great lengths to acquire fancy pots, pans and all sorts of ethnic cookware. I'm glad to say that at last there was one cooking implement I could buy locally. This stainless steel spaetzle scraper is a metal board with holes with a circular shape to fit nicely on a pot of boiling water.

When the water is boiling, take a ladleful of dough and drop it on the spätzli scraper.

Use a plastic scraper to force it through the holes.

Continue until all the dough has gone through. Here is what it looks like from below.

Boil until the spätzli are hard. Make several batches and remove cooked spätzli to the hot bowl on the side. Add some butter and move them a little to prevent sticking.

Remove with a sieve.

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