Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 8: Spätzle

It's not that I thought making spätzle would be particularly hard, but I couldn't really believe how little time it took - 20 minutes after I had started whisking the batter together, I was sieving the last little dumplings from their boiling pot. Perfect spätzle doubtless take a lifetime, but I'm here to tell you that delicious, light, chewy egg noodles can be yours in less than half an hour.

I felt like doing something a bit different, and now that my sister's Joy of Cooking has moved back into this house, knew that there would be at least one spätzle recipe there. For a basic spätzle, you stir together flour, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg, then beat in milk and eggs to make a liquidy batter (Joy describes it as "elastic"). Boil a big pot of water or stock, drop little squiggles into the water a few at a time, and rescue them when they float to the surface (which happens quite quickly). Finito! Much easier than pie.

Now for the notes. Making the batter was of course easy, the only difficulty in knowing what the consistency should be. Joy says to taste the first few to make sure they are light and delicate rather than heavy and dense - adding more water or milk is supposed to lighten them. Mine always were quite light but I did end up adding quite a bit more milk (there was the end of a bottle going bad). I used skim for that reason, sort of a compromise between milk and water though usually I'd prefer to cook with 3.25%.

The only real difficulty was shaping the spätzle. It didn't really matter that they were uneven in size, since it's easy to strain each out as it is cooked. It's just that by dropping them from a spoon I ended up with rather distressingly spermatozoidal noodles. I was recounting this to a friend later and she pointed out that I could just push the batter through a slotted spoon - next time!

As for eating - well, they were delicious. We have whole nutmegs in the spice drawer, and grating even that small amount in made a huge difference in flavour - it subtly permeated the mouth without being in any way cloying. My mother and I kept snacking on them plain from their platter, but we also ate them in minestrone and they went beautifully there. It is important to not pile them on each other after you fish them out - they don't stick to each other, but they do keep steaming and get a bit soggy that way.

So if you visit this blog hoping for a weeknight noodle, this is the clear winner so far - quick, easy, forgiving and pairing well with lots of dishes. There were quite a few other dumpling recipes in Joy, so I'll have expand my horizons. I don't think I've even tasted U.S. Southern-style cornmeal dumplings - unless they're akin to those amazing dumplings at Jamaican restaurants in Brooklyn? Ah, The Islands, how I miss you and and your okra 'n codfish, and your charming staff that make one not mind that one has to wait two hours for supper.