It manages to be both dumplings and noodles at once, and as good tangled with cheese and herbs and bacon and vegetables and as it is alongside a hearty braise. It is never unwelcome. And I realized I had no idea. Hey, did you know that spaetzle is ridiculously easy to make? And cooks in two minutes? First, I made two different batters; the one from Balthazar uses more eggs than a more standard one I kept seeing, so I decided to make both and do a side-by-side comparison.
Then I tried several techniques of dropping the batter into a pot of salted boiling water. A thicker batter might have worked better. Next I tried the colander method — pushing the batter through the holes of a colander into the cooking water — but quickly found pressing a thick colander of batter over a boiling pot of water very unpleasant. And hot. And awkward. After that, I tried to use a makeshift pastry bag, i.
At this point, my kitchen, toddler and I were gummed top to bottom in spaetzle batter and I escaped to my laptop to consider whether, despite my general anti-single purpose appliance stance , if a spaetzle maker might be a good thing to have around. So, it was back to the colander for me! Once I switched to a colander with more than a dozen holes that could sit over the pot of water and put on some potholders, I got the swing of things quickly.
Finally there are a million ways to enjoy spaetzle — and I would like to discover each of them, you know, between sets of crunches — but we enjoyed the heck out of browning it in a pan with butter, and tossing it minced shallots and herbs. Combine the flour, eggs and milk in a large bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour, or overnight.
Prepare an ice bath. Bring a large pot of well salted water to boil. Otherwise, do not fret! Put on two potholders because you probably already know that steam is hot; I apparently did not. Boil for 2 to 3 minutes then use a slotted spoon to fish spaetzle out and drop it in the ice bath. Continue with remaining batter in 3 batches. I found it was important to use only a little batter at a time and even less if your pot is smaller because if you push too much batter in at a time, it becomes one freakish megaspaetzle as opposed to hundreds of tiny twisty ones.
