China Crumpet

Breakfast is one of those things that you always miss when you are not at home, isn’t it? I consider myself pretty adventurous when it comes to eating but nothing for me beats a good old Swedish breakfast of warm rolls, a selection of hard and soft cheeses, deli-meats, some sliced veggies, home made jam, a soft boiled egg and a glass of orange juice. And the paper of course.

Here in Beijing, breakfast has been a particular challenge. We quickly ruled out you tiao, baozi, tea soaked eggs and warm soy milk. Although they are all delicious and it is nice to once in a while experience a true Beijing breakfast experience, the taste profile of that particular breakfast is not what I get out of bed for.

Lining up for some delicious shaobing and soy milk

For a while now, we have settled the matter by making oatmeal porridge with chopped dried fruits, fresh milk and cashew nuts. It has been a good healthy start to the day and yummy enough to have lasted a while.

Our usual brekkie

On the weekends however, when there are a few extra minutes to spare, I have recently found out that baking breakfast rolls is not as hard as it seems. Plus, with home made butter and jam, it’s almost like home!

To try your very own Swedish breakfast experience at home, boil an egg, buy some oranges and squeeze them for some lovely, fresh juice, get some cheese, jam and butter, brew your favorite tea and make a load of Källarfranska (Swedish breakfast rolls).

I usually cheat a bit and make the batter and roll them out the night before I want to eat them and then bake them in the morning. That way I can sleep in instead of having to spend the morning kneading dough and the house will still be filled with the gorgeous smell of newly baked bread while I enjoy the latest copy of the Economist.

Hot rolls on a smoggy morning

For 16 rolls you will need:

14 g instant dry yeast (swedes, this is the equivalent to a 50 g package of fresh yeast)
1/2 litre (2 cups) water, room temperature or slightly tepid
1 tbs sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
3 tbs oil
13 dl all purpose flour

Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the middle.

Mix a couple of tablespoons of the water, the sugar and the yeast in a small bowl until everything is dissolved and leave it until you see tiny bubbles forming on the surface of the yeast mixture.

Pour the yeast mixture, oil and the rest of the water into the well you made in your flour and work the liquids into the flour with your hands. Knead the dough on a floured surface until you have a smooth, springy dough which isn’t too dry or too sticky. Add a little more flour if you need to.

Form the dough into a 50cm long sausage and cut it into 16 parts. Roll the balls slightly and then flatten them so you get 16 roundish dough lumps. Give them a flour coating by gently turning them in a bit of the flour you have on your work space. Put them, well spaced out, on a well oiled or buttered oven tray.

Now you can either put the tray in the fridge with some cling film over it and bake them (without the cling film) straight out of the fridge in the morning or you can let them rise for 40 minutes under a clean kitchen towel.

40 minutes later or the next morning, set your oven to 250°c and bake for 15 minutes or until golden. When they are finished, they should sound hollow when you tap them.

Enjoy with all your different spreads and toppings (if you really want to be Swedish, enjoy your bread with butter, a sharp hard cheese and a thin layer of apricot or orange marmalade) while reading your favorite mag or the paper.

What’s your favorite breakfast?

This sounds so unbelievably pretentious that even I almost gag. I know. But what if I told you that home churned butter tastes a million times better than the store bought kind and only takes about 5 minutes to make? Are you still with me? Wouldn’t you like to try as well??

This whole crazy idea comes from a fellow foodie and blogger “kryddburken“. She writes in Swedish so I felt it was my sacred duty to share in English also. But to those of you who read Swedish, check out her stuff!

So to the butter. All you need for 100 g of pure, home made butter is:

• 3 dl (a bit more than a cup) fresh cream
  (NOT homogenized, processed, or any kind of long lasting cream, it’s gotta be fresh cream or it won’t work. Trust me. In Beijing I get it in a ziplock bag at the xinyuanli market. You Swedes can use vispgrädde.)
• about a teaspoon of good quality salt

THAT’S IT! Then you just whip the cream with an electric whisk until it goes stiff, then really stiff and then starts to separate.

NOTE: If you have been whipping for like 6,7,8 minutes and it just keeps being all shiny and whipped creamy, you have the wrong kind of cream. Enjoy it with hot chocolate or a piece of chocolate red wine cake and forget about the whole butter idea until your next trip to the market.

When you think you’ve ruined the whole thing and have lumps of butter swimming around in milky looking watery liquid you are done. Dump the whole thing through a fine-mesh sieve and squeeze the liquid out with clean, cold hands. You should also run it under some cold water to wash off all the separated liquid, this means it will keep longer. When you have your finished lump of butter, add salt to taste and enjoy.

If you have cream that has gone slightly sour, the butter will be better still. In theory, the butter keeps for a while. In practice, it will be eaten long before it comes close to going bad.

Serving suggestion: We had it today for breakfast with breakfast rolls right out of the oven and freshly squeezed orange juice. A breakfast fit for a king.

What do you do if you have a baguette that needs to be eaten, some mince, an onion and a bunch of eggs? Roti John for breakfast of course!

The perfect food!

Roti John is a Singaporean/Malay hawker food that I fell in love with when I was living there. It is quite simply a perfect sandwich and an example of brilliant fusion food. Apparently it was concocted in Singapore by a local hawker dude who had a foreign customer that would come in each day and ask for an onion omelet with a side of French bread. The inventive hawker dude decided it would be cool to try and combine the two and hence the roti john – John being the name all foreigners were given in Singapore by the locals at time – as we know it was born.

To make this delectable treat you will need:

100g of minced meat of choice (you can use pork, chicken, beef, lamb, seafood or even take the casing off a good sausage and use that! The most “authentic” meat to use is beef.)
3 eggs
1 small onion
Salt to taste
Black pepper to taste
1 loaf of french bread, cut lengthwise in half
oil for frying
Sweet chili sauce and mayo to serve

Chop the onion and mix up the eggs, meat, onion, salt and pepper to a batter, spoon the mixture on to the cut side of the bread, and then quickly flip the bread, batter side down, on to a hot griddle pan with plenty of (olive) oil. Flatten the bread a little with your frying device of choice to make a crisp and browned, eggy surface. When cooked to sufficient goody goodness, turn the bread and fry on the other side as well to crisp the bread up a little. To serve, slice up the bread, plate it and dish up plenty of chili sauce and, if you want to go all out, mayo.

Enjoy!