One of the things we miss the most being back here is the bread.....mostly the Butterzopf and the Shoggi Gipfeli's (the chocolate filled croissants). It just doesn't exist here. So,
Several weekends ago I busted out the "Taste of Switzerland" book that I got for Christmas and was determined to recreate our favorite Butterzopf bread. To pronounce it right, I like to think of the word "boo-tay", in the sense of hey, you have nice boo-tay. Boo-tayr-tzopf. Get it right folks. I am sure my Swiss counterparts are cringing right about now.
After much research on the different types of flours and what to use, I was still left helpless and with conflicting information. The Swiss book says to find a "strong" bread flour, while many internet recipes say that buttertopf is made with a low gluten flour. Not sure where to go with this one......so to simplify things I decided to just go with Gold's "Better for Bread" flour. No where on any flour package could I find it list gluten content so I crossed my fingers on this one and hoped for the best.
First round wasn't so successful. I had some left over yeast I brought back from Switzerland (yes, I am THAT cheap). It apparently didn't survive the flight home, and so my first attempt didn't work.......the bread didn't rise and decided to wait until I attempted it again. So this weekend after a somewhat depressing dinner outing last night (let's just chalk it up to bad food, expensive bill, fast service.......yes, we actually miss 2-3 hour meals), I decided to fill my Sunday with a little re-do bread making to widdle my sorrows away. My favorite thing I got out of storage was my Kitchen Aid mixer. No more dinky hand held mixers......no more bread kneading by hand. This old champ does the trick and in under 5 minutes I might add.
We let the bread rise for 2 hours, and then started the intricate process of braiding with 2 strands. We practiced with towels for awhile before hand, and did pretty good on the first take, I must say.
We let her rise one last time and she was off to bake. And what a beaut she was.
It was about 90% spot on...the more you ate of it, the more I convinced myself it really did ALMOST taste like the real thing. Next time we are going to try and dissolve the butter into the milk instead of cut it into the flour, maybe that will better evenly distribute it. And maybe a couple tablespoons of honey will sweeten things up. That'll be in a couple weeks.....take 2 coming soon!
