Central Europe · Volume 18, Lye, the Purity Myth and the Alp Next Door
Maultaschen
Kloster Maulbronn and the Swabian Lenten table
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Researched
- 11 sources cited
The monastery is Cistercian, not Carthusian, correcting a common misattribution; see the history above.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 to 6, makes about 12 large parcels. About 1½ hours.
Ingredients
- 400 g pasta flour (00 or strong white)
- 4 eggs
- a pinch salt
- 300 g fresh spinach, wilted and squeezed dry
- 250 g minced pork
- 150 g minced veal
- 100 g smoked bacon, finely diced
- 1 onion, finely diced and softened
- 100 g stale white bread, soaked in milk and squeezed
- 1 egg, for the filling
- 1 tsp dried marjoram
- to taste nutmeg
- to taste salt
- to taste pepper
- 1.5 litres good beef or vegetable stock, to poach and serve
Method
- Make the pasta dough from the flour, eggs and salt; knead until smooth, wrap and rest 30 minutes. Roll out thinly and cut into roughly 12 cm squares.
- Combine the spinach, pork, veal, bacon, softened onion, soaked bread, egg and marjoram; season generously with nutmeg, salt and pepper.
- Place a spoonful of filling on each pasta square, brush the edges with water, fold into large rectangular parcels and press the edges firmly to seal.
- Bring the stock to a bare simmer, not a boil, and poach the Maultaschen gently, 8 to 10 minutes, until the pasta is tender and the filling cooked through.
- Serve in the broth (in der Brühe), or lift out, slice, and pan-fry with butter and egg until golden (geschmälzt), a traditional way of using up leftovers the next day.
What a modern chef changes
A hand-folded, deliberately imperfect seal, and a more precisely rendered filling
Rung 4
Method
- Fold each parcel by hand with a slightly uneven pleat rather than crimping mechanically, the same principle as hand-scraped Spätzle: an irregular seal holds the poaching stock's flavour at its edges better than a machine-tight one.
- Render the bacon separately and fold it through the filling off the heat, rather than leaving it raw to cook inside the parcel, for a more even distribution of smoke through the whole filling rather than pockets of it.
- Poach sous vide at a held 82°C for 20 minutes instead of a stovetop simmer, for parcels that hold their shape with total consistency across a large batch, finishing briefly in hot stock only to warm the outside before serving.